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Driving me crazy! Why does a brand new backup scheme keep looking for previous versions?

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I bought a new larger external hard drive because my old one is too small. I have tried every way possible to start from scratch and create a new set of backups stored on the new drive. I created a brand new backup scheme, specified different destinations directories and used different names and still I get errors. When I try to verify the backup it says it can't find version 1. Why does the brand new backup says it has 24 versions, I just created it yesterday. The email backup took 12 hours to complete and still doesn't work. This is crazy. I have spend all week just trying to set up two simple backups, an email backup and a disk backup. The only one that seems to work is the cloud backup.

I am about to toss this software in the trash.

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Elizabeth,

A good way to start over is to (a) delete your backup tasks, (b) uninstall, reboot and reinstall. If you want to keep your current backups files, you can move the TIB files to another directory on the same disk and then hide that directory (right click, properties, hidden) until you are OK with deleting these files manually.

Good advice from Pat. in addition I would use Windows Disk Manager to assign a drive letter to your external storage drive if you have not already done so. This will prevent Windows from changing the drive letter to that drive arbitrarily.

I *think* I'm suffering the same problem... Can somebody help or comment please? Every night, the backups to my NAS are failing. Well, the BACKUPS are failing, but the search for old versions (or something) is failing.  See the excerpt from my log below.

The path to my NAS is always accessible.  I have no need for a drive letter, so don't map it with one.  This is driving me nuts.

True Image 2014 and Win7, in case it matters.

Thanks to anyone for help they can provide,

Peter

Log Excerpt:

12 Information 2/8/2014 5:11:35 AM The following backups have been successfully created: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1.tib"

13 Information 2/8/2014 5:11:39 AM Validate Backup Archive Location: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1.tib"

14 Information 2/8/2014 5:11:40 AM Pending operation 3 started: 'Validate Backup Archive'.

15 Information 2/8/2014 5:58:55 AM Consolidate Backup Archive Location: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1.tib" Destination: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1_7DD51461-4E0E-46CD-9211-31B8AA812921.tib"

16 Information 2/8/2014 5:58:55 AM Consolidate Backup Archive Location: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1.tib" Destination: "\\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_diff_b41_s2_v1_7DD51461-4E0E-46CD-9211-31B8AA812921.tib"

17 True Image 2/8/2014 5:58:55 AM Failed to open backup \\diskstation\backups\ACRONIS_PGVH2\My_partitions_inc_b32_s3_v1.tib. Make sure the backup location is accessible and contains all versions of the backup. This backup may also be corrupted.

Validate your backup from the UI. If the validation fails, delete the task and create another one. If you can stay away from consolidation. Rather choose a scheme that produces a new backup from times to times and that keep only a limited number of version chains (full + inc/diff backups).

Hi Elizabeth,

Sorry about your frustrations with this software. I've been there also, and have evolved to only create full back-ups. I use the Win 7 OS to make copies of my data files from time to time. There is some TI meta-file (whatever that means) that keeps track of everything, that can't simply be deleted, even after files and back-up history/back-up files etc, have been deleted. My only success in starting with a clean slate, was to first completely uninstall the TI software (don't save anything when it asked you about that on uninstall), which I've done a number of times since I installed it, for a variety of reasons, then delete all saved back-ups afterwards, and then re-install the TI software.

I think I have found a work-around for this consolidation problem.
Open the True Image 2014 UI program, and on the backup which is giving this error, click on 'restore'.
You are not actually going to do a restore. By opening the restore dialog, the archives.xml database is opened, and the versions in the db are checked. You will get an error saying that the 1st backup cannot be found. If you lick 'ignore' and continue, this seems to remove the dud entry from the db. If there is more than one backup file missing, you will get the dialog more than once. Reply 'ignore' to each one.
When the restore dialog appears giving a choice of versions to restore, it will only have the ACTUAL backup files which are present in the drop-down.
You can then just cancel out of the restore and your archives.xml database will be fixed.
The next scheduled backup should not give the error.
Worked for me, HTH you

Jeff,
Your approach works great when ATI loses track of existing backup files, but there might be other problems for the OP. Also, after you have ignored versions, I recommend you validate your backup to make sure that the missing of files have not corrupted the backup chains or task.

A similar solution to Jeff Salmon is to stop all ATI services (from services.msc) and then delete (or rename) the archives.xml file in the C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Database folder. Restart the services and open Acronis. It will recreate a new default backup scheme for you (My Partitions) which can you then configure and start over.

Jeff,

Thank you very much for your work around. I just looked at the Change Log for this release that came out last week, and I nearly went postal for seeing such minimal and non-critical bug fixes rather than the half a dozen or so bugs that plague me every time I use this product. I had already tried removing the task, changing backup drives, backup schemes, etc. I have steered my company towards another backup solution for lack of QA in most recent years of Acronis quality going downhill.

Much appreciated. At least one hair was saved by your post.

Chris,
Your suggestion appears to have solved a related problem I had as described in the original post. In my case a freshly created backup task would fail to complete complaining about the absence of totally unrelated backup file belonging to a long deleted backup task.
It's all rather unnerving in terms of Acronis TI 2014 reliability given this bizarre error, but thanks to you my sanity has been saved fort now.