External Drive Cannot Be Started
I am an unsophisticated TI 2021 user. I periodically/manually do a full backup of the 1 TB harddrive in my Dell XPS Windows 10 laptop and have a daily scheduled incremental backup of selected data folders. The backup target is a (far from full) micro SD card that is permanently plugged into my laptop.
I started doing this earlier this year and it worked fine for a while. Suddenly on Feb. 6 I started to routinely (but not every time) get 'The backup cannot be started. Plug in the external drive containing the files of this backup' errors. TI would give it 6 tries (6 failures) and then give up until the next day.
What is interesting is that any time I try to do a manual 'Backup Now' on the same backup it always works. I have never encountered a failure to access this drive other than these TI failures that ONLY happen when trying to do a scheduled backup. They are scheduled for 5:00 pm (when I am typically having dinner) and the system has blanked the display but is otherwise 'running' (no sleep/hibernation/etc involved).
Yesterday I came back to my laptop a bit before 6:00 pm and TI was waiting to do the last attempt at the scheduled back. So I hit 'Backup Now' and TI refused because it was waiting for a scheduled backup. And THIS TIME the scheduled backup worked! No way would that have happened had I not 'tweaked TI a bit' with that Backup Now command.
Any ideas on what the problem here might be? I wonder if there is a power saving option that might be the culprit? I don't recall having changed any of those lately, but I was having issues with losing Wifi and I disabled some option that could turn off my Wifi adapter and that was roughly in the Feb. 6 timeframe (but probably more like late Jan). I am not sure what to look for here.
While I have seen the occasional drive letter reassignment issue when doing my full backups to a different (usually not connected) external drive, I have NEVER seen that on the permanently installed SD card that is the target.
Thanks.
dave
Dave, sorry but I have never had any real confidence in using MicroSD cards for backups so have never used them for such purposes! Have you ever tried to recover any data from this storage medium?
The log files for your backup task may show some more information on what has been happening here?
There is a new MVP Assistant log viewer tool that has now been made available by Acronis via the Community Tools page..
If you have Disks & Partitions backups created on ATI 2020 or later using .tibx files, then look in the Backup Worker logs.
If you have Files & Folders backups using .tib files (or Disk backup using same) then look in the Demon logs.
Other logs are shown by the MVP Assistant under the 'Active Logs' heading of the Log Viewer page of the Assistant.
The log files should be zipped to preserve their original file names if sharing in the forums and would need to be less than 3MB in size, otherwise you would need to share the zip file via a Cloud share service such as OneDrive, Dropbox etc.
Steve, thanks for the the pointer and explanation. I will check this out.
I have to admit that an experienced user asking the question "can you recover files saved to ANY/Conventional storage device (certainly one that is not off the wall), where said files have been validated," is a very disturbing question to hear asked. I will check this. But even if it works - this is very disturbing question to have asked. Can you elaborate?
Thanks.
dave
Dave, my main reason for asking about recovery from the MicroSD card is that I have vague recollections of seeing posts where there were issues doing so, but nothing I can put my finger on directly!
Personally I only use external USB HDD drives, which for my main laptop is a 2TB Seagate laptop drive in an external enclosure using USB 3.0 which also doubles as a Survival Kit drive that I can boot from, but which will fit nicely in the pocket of my laptop travel bag.
In terms of testing, you would need to boot the laptop from the Acronis rescue media and check that your MicroSD card can be recognised / seen as either a backup destination or source for recovery, to ensure that the controller for the card reader is supported in that environment.
For me, I only use these SD cards in my cameras and swap them into the laptop when doing a sync of the card data to the laptop drive.
Steve, thanks for the explanation. I think what you are saying is that simply trying to recover a file from the SD card using the standard Windows interface to Acronis is not a complete test. And I can see how that might be the case.
dave
Dave, see forum topic: ATI Bootable Media backup to microSD? - for a recent discussion in this area.
Also an older topic: Recovering from a Micro SD Card
Thanks again, Steve. I need to validate this stuff but I believe what I am reading is not that the data in the SD archive is bad, but there might be issues with getting to that data in a recovery scenario.
I do a complete system backup to an external HDD (Acronis bootable) roughly once a week, and a daily data backup to an SD card. So in the case of a catastropic failure I would boot and recover off the HDD and get back to an execution/data environment no more than a week old. Then I can recovery more recent data from the SD card or if I have to copy it to the HDD or my newly recovered C: drive, that should work.
Am I reading the correctly? And a BIG thanks for all your help here.
dave
Dave, it is the getting access to the data in a recovery scenario that I am looking at. SD cards have been reliable in my experience but being able to access them from a bootable environment is another story as this then involves device drivers for the controller used by the card reader.