Mobile phone backups unable to delete folders with duplicate data & contact list with 0 bytes
I am running Acronis True Image 2020. I attempted to backup using wifi my new Samsung Galaxy S20+ yesterday using the Mobile backup to my PC running Windows 10 64 bit.
I see all of the photos and videos but do not see any data in the contacts backed up. They appear as 0 bytes.
I had set the mobile backup to continuous automatically on my phone. Not sure how this knows when to back up to my computer.
I now have 6 other duplicate backups. They are all 30gb. I attempted to permanently delete one of these backups but keep receiving the error:
"The disk is write protected
Remove the write protection or use another disk."
So I tried selecting all the contents in each folder such as the folder for photos or videos without any luck.
1) How can I permanently delete these other duplicate folders of the Mobile backup?
2) How can I tell if the Contact VCF in fact are backed up when it appears as 0 bytes
Yesterday the message folders were showing as 0 bytes but today, I can see messages when I clik on some of the phone numbers.
I hope you can assist me to delete these 5 duplicated folders of 30gb each and also explain how the Mobile backup is continuously automatically backed up to my PC.
Thank you for any assistance you can offer!
Remoe
Hi Steve,
I turned it off as you suggested and tried to delete the first backup. Immediately it gave the same result for each folder within the backup.
"The disk is write protected
Remove the write protection or use another disk"
What else can we try?
Frederic, sorry but it looks like Acronis have changed something that now prevents old mobile backups being deleted!!! I have just tried to do this with my own mobile phone backup and the only option that I can see would be to use the Delete option in the ATI GUI for the Mobile backup task! (Which will delete everything / all backups!).
This definitely used to be possible on earlier versions because my own mobile backups are over 1.3GB each and having multiple of these with lots of duplicate files is too wasteful of disk space!
Currently I haven't found any way of deleting just one backup folder!
Hi Steve,
I didn't know what ATI GUI referred to. I think I figured it out that it was the Acronis Mobile app on my Samsung phone. I went into it and deleted the backup. I don't see any of the 7 backups now in File Explorer on my laptop. It said it was in the M drive. I don't have a M drive. I have the C drive and a 2nd solid state F drive installed in the laptop. What is the M drive that was created with the Acronis backup on the laptop?
It doesn't seem that Acronis Mobile is a good solution for backing up my Android phone to a PC.
Any suggestions? And I am looking for a program that I set to do backups automatically of new data from my phone to my PC
I really don't want to upload to the Cloud with some of the data I have.
Thank you Steve.
Frederic, the ATI GUI is referring to the ATI 2020 application running in Windows on the desktop but deleting the backup from the Android phone does the same as deleting it via the GUI on the PC.
The M: drive on the PC is a SUBST virtual drive mapped to the location set in the main ATI application Settings for Mobile Storage location (defaults to the User Local AppData folder).
Thinking further about this topic, all .tibx files used for backup storage are read-only and cannot be modified by deleting any of the content, so it looks like the behaviour that I have seen & used previously to delete unwanted Mobile backup folders has been stopped!
The key factor that prevents Acronis Backup from capturing all mobile phone data on both Android and Apple phones is that it does not have root access on the devices, therefore cannot access any data that requires that level of access. The mobiles would have to be 'jail broken' to gain that root access which would then pose other security and support issues!
For my Android phone, email is held on the IMAP mail servers and duplicated on my PC, contacts are backed up to my Google account plus exported to the SIM and SD cards, photos are uploaded to my OneDrive account, so really there is very little need to use Acronis!
Thank you Steve for that explanation. So let me see if I understood SUBST virtual drive mapped to the location set in the main ATI application Settings for Mobile Storage location (defaults to the User Local AppData folder).
Those 6 backups when I cliked on Properties were 30gb. Did that really mean those 6 backups were physically taking up 180gb on my C solid state hard drive?
What does GUI mean?
I really don't understand root access other than to try to recover deleted files on an old Samsung Galaxy S5, one of the suggestions was to root the phone which I did. That's a work still in progress to see if a tech wiz friend of mine can eventually accomplish. But I basically understood what you meant about needing to get to that level of access.
I already had backed up 98% of the phone to my PC by transferring the contents that were previously loaded on a micro SD card. I moved all of the SD card to the Samsung Galaxy S20+ with 512gb of memory. I know I could encrypt the SD card, but from what I have read, the SD card is worthless if the phone needed to be factory reset or if someone was to "steal" the SD card.
Perhaps I'll look into the One Drive cloud. I have a Family Microsoft 365 subscription and I read that would allow 6TB of storage (1 TB each account). I am hesitant about the Cloud in case it is breached. That's why I was looking for a solution to incrementally backup the phone to the PC. I would still do a weekly incremental Acronis backup of the PC.
Thank you again Steve. I remember you assisted me about a year on another issue!
Fredric Lowe wrote:Thank you Steve for that explanation. So let me see if I understood SUBST virtual drive mapped to the location set in the main ATI application Settings for Mobile Storage location (defaults to the User Local AppData folder).
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19042.746] (c) 2020 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Windows\System32>subst M:\: => C:\Users\smiths\AppData\Local\Acronis\Acronis Drive C:\Windows\System32>Those 6 backups when I cliked on Properties were 30gb. Did that really mean those 6 backups were physically taking up 180gb on my C solid state hard drive?
Click on Acronis Drive in Explorer, then look at the size for the Mobile phone backup folder.
What does GUI mean?
GUI = Graphical User Interface, i.e. the main ATI application window when launched.
I really don't understand root access other than to try to recover deleted files on an old Samsung Galaxy S5, one of the suggestions was to root the phone which I did. That's a work still in progress to see if a tech wiz friend of mine can eventually accomplish. But I basically understood what you meant about needing to get to that level of access.
I already had backed up 98% of the phone to my PC by transferring the contents that were previously loaded on a micro SD card. I moved all of the SD card to the Samsung Galaxy S20+ with 512gb of memory. I know I could encrypt the SD card, but from what I have read, the SD card is worthless if the phone needed to be factory reset or if someone was to "steal" the SD card.
Perhaps I'll look into the One Drive cloud. I have a Family Microsoft 365 subscription and I read that would allow 6TB of storage (1 TB each account). I am hesitant about the Cloud in case it is breached. That's why I was looking for a solution to incrementally backup the phone to the PC. I would still do a weekly incremental Acronis backup of the PC.
Thank you again Steve. I remember you assisted me about a year on another issue!
I have never needed to 'jail break' or root a mobile phone, and doing so would immediately break any warranty on new phones. I also keep the minimum of private data on my phone and use password protection for that which is kept.
In honesty, my biggest concern would be losing my Authenticator app data which is used for unlocking other apps using two phase authentication with codes generated on the phone!
Thanks again Steve!