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System Volume Information causes error in offline backup

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I was using the rescue media today to backup my drives and encountered a very weird problem.

I have three drives on my system, C: (SSD), D: (SSD) and G: (HDD). I backed up each separately with a Disk and Partitions backup. In order to run the backups quicker, I deferred validation and ran them under Windows. No problems with C: and G:, but with D: I received a weird error. The log from the rescue media is attached here. Although the backup is claimed to have succeeded, the log shows a weird error. The validation under the Windows UI failed. But looking at the backup through Windows Explorer looks OK. The logged error is

<event code="5" id="5" level="3" line_tag="0x93A5673481E3B060" message="Failed to add the backup to the backup list. The backup may be locked or corrupted. Also, make sure the folder contains the last volume of the backup, and does not contain a renamed copy of the same backup." module="257" time="1569982191">
		<field name="$module" type="TIdentifier">trueimg_home_pe_vsa64_17750</field>
		<event code="11" id="6" level="3" line_tag="0x93A5673481E3B060" message="Failed to add backup E:\Bruno\ArchiveNoBackup\Computers\Acronis\MVP Media Builder\Brunos versions\ATI2019_14690_MVPWinPE_ADK1809_10.1.17763.1_full_b1_s1_v1.tib.&#10;The backup list already contains this backup." module="257" time="1569982191">
			<field name="$module" type="TIdentifier">trueimg_home_pe_vsa64_17750</field>
		</event>
	</event>

What's weird is that the referenced file on E: is not on the drive I was backing up. E: my HDD (G: under Windows). On a whim, I excluded System Volume Information from the backup and it worked fine. No errors in the Rescue Media and no error on validation under Windows ATI.

I don't know much about System Volume Information, but I can't understand why it would reference a file on another drive. I'm not sure how to go about fixing it. Meanwhile, excluding it from the backup is OK as it's only a data disk and I don't need it.

Attachment Size
DBad-2019-10-01-181723.txt 2.8 KB
0 Users found this helpful

Bruno, very strange...!  System Volume Information folders are normally excluded by default in all ATI backups created in Windows and unless you have Windows System Protection enabled to give restore points (which MS have turned off by default several years back) then these folders are not normally needed.

Rescue media is much more basic and requires users to set any exclusions manually which is a pity in many ways, I would prefer that the same basic exclusions were set then allow users to remove any that didn't want rather than giving a blank list!

It seems that the System Volume Information folder also has data for the Distributed Link Tracking Client ("Maintains links between NTFS files within a computer or across computers in a network."). So I then deleted the offending file on the other drive and I was then able to create the backup without the error showing up in the log. But... validation still failed.

I ran another quick test where I backed up the D: drive, excluding all my data, to the G: drive. It was thus a very fast backup. No errors in the backup, but it too failed validation under the Windows UI. The logged validation error is: Error 0xb03e9: Cannot open the backup.
 

The same backup created under the Windows version does not have any problems.