Skip to main content

Backup disk content deleted when plugging it into PC

Thread needs solution

For years since ATI 2014 I've been making a full backup to an external drive on a Saturday then incrementals the rest if the week. The following Saturday I remove the disk and put a 2nd one on. There are 3 backups for drives C:, D: and E: into separate folders under an umbrella \Acronis folder. The cycle then repeats ad nauseum. The last couple if weeks when plugging the external disk drive in the drive letter (F:) has not been recognised and Windows 10 Disk Management shows an active partition but all files have been deleted. I have to reformat the drive and reallocate the drive letter. Obviously this is not great for a backup disk! Has this happened to anyone else and is there a fix? I don't know whether it's an Acronis or a Windows 10 issue. It's only the disks containing Acronis .tibx files that are affected. If I plug another drive into the same USB port that doesn't contain Acronis files it is not cleared.

0 Users found this helpful

Sorry but more information / detail is needed here?

How many backup tasks are you using here with your three different backup drives?

KB 62741: Acronis True Image: rotating backup destination disks requires separate backup plans per destination disk

I have never seen the issue you are describing and don't recall seeing others reporting this here in the forums.

Don't understand the comment. As far as I am aware you do not need to have a separate external drive for each task. Just use separate folders and tell ATI to browse to it when initially setting up the tasks. Only two backup drives are used as stated in the original post. It's a "father/son" system.

Each external backup drive has an Acronis folder and underneath that three separate folders for each of the three tasks. It's an incremental backup scheme so get a full backup on a Saturday then incrementals every evening until the following Friday. On the next Saturday the backup drive is removed and the other one connected. Usually I then delete the files already on that disk, tell ATI the folders to use and kick the whole cycle off again. It's been running like this for years with only the occasional hiccough. The behaviour as described in the first post then started a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately it turns out I was slightly incorrect - the files have not been deleted and are still on the drive; it's just the drive letter that has been lost. I have to go into disk management and reassign it every Saturday when I plug the "new" drive in. Bit of a pain.

R Bourne wrote:

Each external backup drive has an Acronis folder and underneath that three separate folders for each of the three tasks. It's an incremental backup scheme so get a full backup on a Saturday then incrementals every evening until the following Friday. On the next Saturday the backup drive is removed and the other one connected. Usually I then delete the files already on that disk, tell ATI the folders to use and kick the whole cycle off again.

Sorry but the above is a recipe for potential problems.

You are using a single task with multiple destination drives regardless of duplicating the folder structure & paths on those different drives.  The drives themselves have unique partition identifiers that ATI uses to detect the correct / expected drive.

If you are also manually deleting files from the backup drives, then that is another problem that will come back and bite you.  Acronis stores information about all the files created in an internal database and will give pop-up error messages for 'missing versions' / 'cannot find....' when files are deleted in Explorer but references left behind in the database.

Reselecting the destination drive for the task will allow you to switch to the second drive in the set but still leaves all the file references in the database about the previous drive & files.

This is what the referenced KB 62741 document is dealing with.  If you want a 'father/son' drive scenario then have father and son backup tasks to match the drives that are connected each week plus setup the automatic cleanup rules in each task to manage the number of backup files being retained.

Amazing that it's worked for over 7 years then without problems until a couple of weeks ago. You don't need ATI to restore a file - just open it in Windows Explorer and copy it back to where you want. The whole ATI database thing is a waste of time and resource. The thing is overcomplicated.

It's probably a Windows 10 issue anyway since it apparently updated itself prior to this issue.

Can't be bothered with any more if this rubbish. Topic closed.