Incremental Backup with an issue could cause automatic cleanup to fail
I'm experimenting on the settings I want for a company with about 8 computers. For testing I set an incremental backup to create a full version every 3 versions, and Store no more than 2 recent version chains on a 1 MB test folder to speed things up.
Everything seems fine and dandy as it will delete the old and keep no more than 2 chains. But if I test a real world scenario and manually/externally delete the last increment backup file from the previous backup, the backups continue.
During an earlier test I did get some popup about the backup was paused, an orange icon appeared in the system tray, but when I open ATI 2021 I get a popup error that it "Failed to open backup". There still was a "Next Backup:" scheduled. For testing I didn't want to wait an hour or more so I set the schedule to a minute later and closed the program to test.
Sure enough it keeps making backups, but never removes anything. So there's either a potential to fill up the backup drive and have no more backups created for all computers, or if pause actually works then have no more backups created immediately for that system.
Is there any way to set this software to be foolproof and keep backing up even if just one small incremental is missing? I've already ran into this situation with their systems filling up the backup drive and not backing up other computers. Which just so happened to lead to data loss because one of their external drives died and wasn't being backed up due to a full backup drive due to backup issues.
For the average end user, the little orange status icon means nothing, and it wasn't there before testing the issue, and now it just stays there stating "100% complete" even though it keeps backing up and not removing previous backups. And after every backup and failed removal, there's still "No new notifications".
Steve Smith wrote:If you start introducing changes to the backup task by deleting or moving files outside of the main ATI application, then you are also introducing errors due to ATI using an internal database to track the files that each task creates and which it expects to find when the task runs.
Well, like I said, a real world scenario. Would if some outside process deleted one .TIB file. Would if the computer creating the incremental file has a BSOD with a partial corrupt .TIB file. I mean the situations are endless on why a backup file can go missing.
So I left the backup schedule to every hour today. So far I have 7 new files created just today. It's now up to b6_s1_v1 and the corrupt b1_s1_v1 is still there.
This seems like a major bug, the warnings keep saying that the backup is paused, but the files keep appearing because the automatic cleanup is not working correctly. Plus the Activity keeps showing that the backup was successful.
Is there a bug thread somewhere so I can submit these issues?
Tom, if you believe that you have found a bug in the way ATI 2021 handles errors and automatic cleanup, then you need to raise this directly with Acronis Support who will then collect diagnostic information from your system and pass this to one of their developers to investigate.
When submitting the support case to Acronis, provide them with the simplest set of steps for how this issue can be reproduced, i.e. simulating a damaged, deleted or missing incremental slice file for a backup.
See How to get support? for how to open the support case if you haven't done so previously.
Steve Smith wrote:Tom, if you believe that you have found a bug in the way ATI 2021 handles errors and automatic cleanup, then you need to raise this directly with Acronis Support who will then collect diagnostic information from your system and pass this to one of their developers to investigate.
When submitting the support case to Acronis, provide them with the simplest set of steps for how this issue can be reproduced, i.e. simulating a damaged, deleted or missing incremental slice file for a backup.
See How to get support? for how to open the support case if you haven't done so previously.
Well, I did check out one of the previous links you had listed. It states:
"If you used earlier versions of Acronis True Image, you may expect a separate .tib file to be produced on each run of the backup - writing all incremental backups to the same file is one of the changes from the .tib format. It is not possible to force the old behavior to put incremental backups in separate .tibx files."
I had installed a previous temp license on this machine in 2019, maybe I used 2019 or 2020, but either way it must have kept some registry settings from the old install which is forcing it to write separate .TIB files while using this 2021 build. What I'll need to do is completely uninstall 2021, then go through the registry and directories to eliminate all traces, then reinstall it so I can experiment with .TIBX files. I'm sure they won't care about the legacy way they used to do things.
I suppose one .TIBX file would solve any corrupt separate file issues plus make it a bit more robust.
Tom, the ability for ATI 2020 / 2021 to consolidate incremental backup slices in a single file is available only for .tibx format files, which in turn are only used by new Disks & Partitions backup tasks created by these versions.
All versions of ATI continue to use .tib files (with separate files for both incremental & differential backup slices) for all Files & Folders tasks and when using the ASZ, Optical media, or FTP for Disks & Partitions tasks.
If a Disk backup task is created prior to ATI 2020 and brought forward to 2020 / 2021 via upgrading the Acronis application, then that would also continue to use .tib files.
Steve Smith wrote:Tom, the ability for ATI 2020 / 2021 to consolidate incremental backup slices in a single file is available only for .tibx format files, which in turn are only used by new Disks & Partitions backup tasks created by these versions.
All versions of ATI continue to use .tib files (with separate files for both incremental & differential backup slices) for all Files & Folders tasks and when using the ASZ, Optical media, or FTP for Disks & Partitions tasks.
If a Disk backup task is created prior to ATI 2020 and brought forward to 2020 / 2021 via upgrading the Acronis application, then that would also continue to use .tib files.
Well that blows. I'd like the reliability of just one backup file for folders and files too.
But anyway, I've opened a support ticket for the bugs in the way it handles a missing file and the potential for the backup drive to fill up causing even more problems.
Thanks for your help.
Tom, please let us know how you get on with the support ticket!
Steve Smith wrote:Tom, please let us know how you get on with the support ticket!
Well, Steve, the support ticket help basically responded, "This is to keep you informed that, it is not recommended to delete backup files out of the Acronis True Image interface and it will cause corruption of the entire backup."
They just don't get it, I'm trying to submit a bug report and they reply back with instructions on not manually deleting any files and gave a list of instructions on how to delete the old backup job and create a new one.
So apparently there is no method on reporting bugs in their software.
Oh well, I'm done wasting my time trying to help them make their software better. I just hope no one else runs into this bug resulting in a full backup drive causing data loss on all of their other perfectly working backup installs on their network. This can be a serious issue, but Acronis doesn't care to do anything about it.
Tom, thanks for the update and understand your frustration with Acronis Support who seem to not be able to work away from scripted scenarios!
On a positive note, my own experience has been that my backups have never been impacted by any individual incremental files being corrupted or deleted that I was ever aware of! Most of my backups are duplicated to other destinations to try to avoid any single point of failure / exposure.
With ATI 2021 I also use a mix of Disk and File backup tasks, so am using both .tibx & .tib files with the added protection that .tibx give by storing incrementals within a single file.