Suddenly losing some, but not all, of scheduled backup settings.
I have four Windows 10 21H1 machines in my Acronis online dashboard, running a mix of ATI 2019 or ATI 2018. Have daily backups scheduled on all four machines, have space clean-up to groom the backups to never exceed more than 1.5TB - 2TB for each machine, and have notification settings to email me after each backup and/or if remaining backup space gets below 500GB.
On June 6 I happened to look in the backup reports folder and noticed that one machine hadn't emailed me since the successful completion of the June 30 backup. Physically visited that machine (not in Dashboard settings) and found that ATI showed the backup had been executing daily with the scheme intended.
But the space grooming option, and the notification options, were now all unconfigured. "Weird", I thought, as I simply re-configured them and went on my way. That one happened to be ATI 2019.
Today, a different machine that emailed me yesterday did not email me today. So I physically visited that machine, and found the exact same deficiency: ATI showed the backup had been executing daily with the scheme intended, but the space grooming option, and the notification options, were now all unconfigured. This one happened to be ATI 2018.
So "out of the blue" these ATI instances which have been chugging along daily suddenly lost "part, but not all" of their ATI backup configuration. And now I'm waiting for it to happen to the rest of them.
Is the Dashboard doing something that maybe isn't appropriate for non-latest ATI versions? I'm just trying to think of a reason for why the backup configuration would change on these ATI installations, when we haven't been interactively launching or changing anything in ATI for many months.
The Dashboard just comes to mind as something that could have still synced some inappropriate backup configuration change, when I know the user in front of the machines (me) did not make that change. Certainly "other things have changed on the machines", like the application of Windows updates. It's just harder to correlate these non-ATI changes to "would have resulted specifically in the loss of just the notification and auto-cleanup settings in the ATI backup, with the rest of the settings remaining intact." That just sounds like something that only Acronis could do.
The only other thing I've noticed, when I do look at the Dashboard, is that the Dashboard seems confused about "next backup" dates. The date of last backup is correct, but the date of next backup could be in the past, or too far into the future. But when I visit the physical machine where ATI is installed, ATI itself is not confused about either of these dates.
For example, in the Dashboard I have one machine showing July 8, 2021 2:00am was the last backup (correct), and the next backup shows as July 1, 2021 2:00am (in the past). Another shows July 8, 2021 2:00am was the last backup (correct), and the next backup shows as July 17, 2021 2:00am (instead of tomorrow). Both machines, when I physically visit the installed ATI, show last backup as July 8, 2021 2:00am and next backup as July 9, 2021 2:00am.
I don't really care if Dashboard is correct; I don't use Dashboard for anything. But just wanted to mention it in case it's a clue to anything.


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Thanks for that, Steve. And makes sense that the ultimate cause for the previous instances was indeed a change being pushed out through the Dashboard / managed service.
Debating whether I really want to disable the integration; I think I'm going to take the "export backup settings to .ZIP" approach instead for now, after fixing all the items that were lost.
The biggest unknown or concern I have for that approach is how ATI will actually react if I restore the settings. There have been other cases where ATI essentially "abandoned" the existing backup file set and started creating a new set of backup files, rather than continuing to maintain the existing files as part of the current scheme. When making what I thought was just "a non-scheme-related change" to the backup settings. .
But, fingers crossed, maybe we never find out.
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