ATI 2015 decided it can't handle NTFS Junction Points

So I take it by viewing your screenshot that you used junction points to relocate your AppData folder? I suppose as well that these folders now reside on a different drive other than your system drive?

Have you tried running the backup from the Recovery Media? This may be your best option here since the installed Windows app goes into this as you say loop.

I use junction points and Mount points both. I do not use the installed Windows app when backing up the system drive, I use the Recovery Media for that purpose and I have not experienced any problem in doing so.

unfortunately no, I am not using any cutom junction points. that is just a built in junction point windows 7 uses for backwards compatibility that ATI 2015 is choking to death on.....

Are you using a file backup?

What do you mean by

my 5GB of data magically turned into 65GB according to ATI 2015...

when I right click on the folders in windows explorer (ie. C:\Users\Doria) and select properties the the dialog box that appears says the total data size is approximately 5GB.

I presume you're familiar with the ATI 2015 interface, its a bit different than previous versions (to say the least) but the backup layout in simplest form is menu on the left, backup source circle in center, backup destination circle on right, options and start backup buttons down at the bottom.

in the above described ATI 2015 interface, when you select your source for backup (ie. C:\Users\Doria) ATI 2015 will then parse/catalog your source selection and display the amount of data it thinks it needs to backup under that backup source circle you just clicked for selecting source

it is at this point, about 20 minutes later mind, you ATI 2015 tells me it thinks it is going to backup approximately 65GB of data.....

..... 65GB because it is failing to properly handle those default NTFS Junction Points that exist in Windows Vista/Server 2K8 and newer.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968829%28v=v…

"It is important that backup applications do not traverse these junction points, or attempt to backup data under them, for two reasons:

    Doing so can cause the backup application to back up the same data more than once.
    It can also lead to cycles (circular references)."

and that is exactly what that screenshot of Process Monitor in my 1st post is showing, ATI 2105 traversing the Application Data junction point

I believe you solved your problem in your statement that you have TI 2015 installed on Windows Vista/Server 2K8 and newer. The TI 2015 application does not officially support those operating systems. See link below:

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2015/index.html#2…

Just for kicks and giggles you should try the bootable recovery media!

I never said I was running ATI 2015 on Windows Vista OR Windows Server 2008.

I did however point out that Windows Vista / Server 2008 and newer (which includes Windows 7, which is what ATI 2015 is running on), include Windows NTFS Junction Points out of the box by default that are used for backwards compatibility.

So, no, in point of fact, I did not answer my own question, but I do sincerely thank you for your interest in this problem.

I have no need for bootable recovery media, but if you would like some giggles and insight you should open a command prompt and run:
dir /s /al c:\

(and, for a really good laugh my IP is banned at the moment because the acronis forums thinks I'm a spam bot because i edited my previous post multiple times to fix typos so I'm having to reply from a different location with a different IP until my IP from my home location becomes un-banned.....)

I assume you are talking about a file backup. Your mentioning that you don't need a recovery CD confirms that. IF it were a disk and partition backup, the problem wouldn't arise, and you would definitely need a recovery CD.

Coming back to a file backup case, I did some testing.

When I unhide the hidden files, launch ATI and create a file backup, it is indeed possible to include the "Document and Settings" and other backward compatibility hidden shell folders.

A workaround is to exclude these files using the exclusion settings.

I get that you guys are trying to help but...

nowhere have i mentioned "Documents and Settings" at all...

I'll be real clear and concise.

The screenshot in post #1 is of Sysinternals' Process Monitor.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb896645.aspx
Process Monitor allows you to see in real time file/registry/network/thread activity.
What you see in the screenshot in post #1 is TrueImage.exe parsing the path of "C:\Users\Doria\AppData\Local\Application Data" over and over and over.

which leads us to post #4, where I explicitly linked the MSDN library article on Junction Points,
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968829%28v=v…
and explicitly copied an excerpt out of that library entry into my message:

"It is important that backup applications do not traverse these junction points, or attempt to backup data under them, for two reasons:
    Doing so can cause the backup application to back up the same data more than once.
    It can also lead to cycles (circular references)."

because this is exactly what ATI 2015 is doing. it is traversing windows default junction points that are part of the windows user profile folder hierarchy and resulting in ATI 2015 thinking a user profile folder (that is actually only 5GB) is 65GB... which is what the screenshot in post #6 clearly shows...

All that is being done is the attempted backup of a single user profile on this computer (see attached screenshot titled "backup_selection.png"), the most simplest of tasks...

and, as far as adding exclusions... I tried that, ATI 2015 can't even do that... the ADD button never activates... (see attached screenshot called "manual_exclusion_broken.png"

Want to know the best part? I purchased 5 licenses of ATI 2015 (1 for each of the computers) and it worked fine for about 2 weeks... until it didn't.
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/92199

so the situation has gone from bad (backups failing) to worse (can't even create new backup routines).

Honestly it's almost at the point where I'll be demanding a refund and switching to Symantec Backup Exec...

Ok, first off you need to understand that this forum is made up of users of the product attempting to help other users of the product. The MVP's here do NOT work for Acronis and offer assistance on a voluntary basis. Your frustration is understandable and help here limited to the experience of other users and MVP's with the product.

Your issue is not something that is common in fact, I would say it is quite uncommon. I have looked at both of your threads and in my opinion they are related. Judging by your forum join date I would think that you are inside the 30 day support window and still have some time left for technical support before the 30 day expiration. If I am correct your issue may only be solved by the technical support staff of Acronis.

Having said that your post #92199 show 3 errors, task aborted, application unable to create snapshot, and drive not ready. Your issue as reported in your #92199 post is with the non stop backup service. You state that this function has stopped working so if that is the case then that is at least part of the problem. Have you looked at Windows Event Viewer for errors? That would be a good place to start looking for anything underlying the problem here.

I can also say that the unable to create snapshot error points to a problem with Windows VSS and Acronis snapapi in the way that snapshots are being handled. I can also say that the drive not ready error points to one of the drives in the equation not responding for some reason. Looking into these 2 areas might bring you to a resolution. I can also say that in some cases like yours where there is an uncommon issue an uninstall of the product and reinstall fixes the issue.

Do some more investigating into these subjects. Make sure that the non stop backup service is running in Windows services for example, While there check to see if the VSS service is enabled, you might also want to look into how much space is allocated to that service on your system, if there is insufficient space this could be the issue, make sure that your HDD's are powered on when needed, sometimes power management issues cause drive not ready issues.

Report back with what ever you can find and maybe things can get sorted out for you.

C:\Users\Doria\AppData\Local\Application Data is a special legacy shell folder shortcut to ensure backward compatibility with older apps. There are several of these in various locations of the C:\users\ folders.

You do not need to backup these. If you try, you will get circular references and data duplication.

I don't know why you would need to backup the AppData folder anyway using a file backup. There are many files in there that are system files.
If you really want to backup specifc files in the AppData folder, (like Windows Live Mail folders, for example), look up the location of the user data files for each program you are worried about and try to backup these files specifically. Note that files like Mozilla apps might not let ATI access them because they are locked. You will have to try.

At any rate, the proper way of backing up system files, is to use use a disk and partition backup.

@Enchantech
I'll try to answer all your points as follows:

Yes post #92199 in the other thread deals with non stop backup however the problem is that currently no backup methos work- because regardless of what backup method is chosen ATI 2015 is parsing those junction points and if the backup now button is clicked it just errors out...

Yes, my apologies if I come off as a bit gruff, I understand that the MVPs are volunteers, but I've also seen other threads where acronis employees have chimed in.

I figured it's uncommon because no matter how much time i spent with google i came up empty.

ATI 2015 was purchased on 2015-05-01, installed on 2015-05-12 (when the new PCs arrived) and all these catastrophic errors began between 2015-06-10 & 2015-06-12.

ALL installations are properly licensed

I spent 3-4 days straight troubleshooting this problem before i even registered on the forums.

During those days I did all of what you are asking to do now (as a standard troubleshooting procedure, this isn't my first rodeo) before I even registered.

I only came here to the acronis forums when I was out of ideas...

I've checked the windows event viewer for any related issues, I checked to see if any windows updates had been recently installed, I checked for any related driver updates, I even started going through the acronis logs looking for anything that would be of use.

None of the computers listed any events for Acronis, VSS, volsnap, etc (although there are a plethora of errors related to Adobe Reader DC, but this is a different issue)

all PCs (including the one with the HDD that backups are set to be saved to) are set to never turn off the HDD, never sleep, and the NICs have the checkbox unchecked so that windows will not turn the NIC off to save power. All systems and network hardware are on battery backups.

All Acronis services are running and set to automatic, Volume Shadow Copy service is set to Manual (it doesn't have to be Auto, it just can not be set to disabled)

To quickly test VSS functionality I used FreeFileSync 7.0 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/) and sync'd C:\Doria\ across the LAN just fine...

After deleting the failing backup routines and attempting to recreate them, and them failing I then created a forums account

As of right now 'VSSAdmin list ShadowStorage' shows:

Shadow Copy Storage association
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 91.974 GB (10%)

so there's plenty of space...
why does "Allocated Shadow Copy Storage" have a value of zero you ask? because System Restore is disabled.

Know what's sad? I've used Acronis True Image for years for cloning HDDs ever since Norton Ghost became unreliable a bit over a decade ago...
I never needed to register on the forums because I never had any problems (this is actually my modus operandi behind almost every forums account i have on the internet)

I uninstalled ATI 2015, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, attempted to create a new backup routine and guess what...

It's STILL parsing those junctions...

AND, as an added bonus I've included a screenshot of Sysinternals' Process Explorer (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx)
It shows TrueImage at 100% CPU usage while it's parsing those junctions.
Also of interest is this screenshot was taken from a different system where the only thing that is being backed up is C:\Users\Robin
I'd show screenshots of all the computers but that would be redundant since they are all behaving the same.

not that it seems to matter but 2 of the systems are about a month old, and the other 2 are a few years old

https://kb.acronis.com/content/1512 was a good read, thank you for mentioning snapapi

@Pat L
if you don't think %UserProfile%\AppData\ is worth backing up let me tell you that...
1) you just lost all of that person's email, contacts, and calendar if they use Microsoft Outlook 2007 & older
2) you just lost all of that person's email address autocomplete/autofill history for every version of Microsoft Outlook
3) you just lost all of that person's email & contacts if they use Mozilla Thunderbird or Zimbra Desktop (even more lost data of they use ZD)
4) you just lost all of that that person's Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Maxthon web browser settings including all of their bookmarks/favorites.
5) you just lost all of that person's custom settings for almost every piece of software they use that isn't stored in their ntuser.dat registry hive (assuming you're even backing up ntuser.dat)

@Acronis Devs
whomever decided to use a time value of the # of seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00 (aka unix time) in those logs needs to reconsider such a shitty decision, this makes troubleshooting significantly more of a pain in the ass.
Let me give you a URL:
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm
what's so wrong with using YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm-ss ?????