Issues when backing up on shutdown
Hallo all:
I am volunteering in a small public library. We have 2 Windows 7 PCs with Acronis True Image 2013 and an Ethernet NAS, where the backups are stored.
Things may be different with newer ATI versions, but I am relucting to upgrade before finding out what is going on.
The library software uses a Gupta SQLBase database server. You need to stop the related Windows service before backing its files up. I am relatively new to the library, so I do not know more details yet. I guess there is a way to back up the database whilst still online with some clever SQL statement, but there is more software and more data on the PC to backup anyway.
Years ago, the IT guy bought both ATI licences and set up a full disk backup on shutdown. That has been working fine for years. But in the last months, both PCs randomly hang on shutdown.
After some investigation, it turns out that ATI complains that the destination backup repository is corrupt. ATI maintains no log file as far as I can see. I only see the error as a pop-up taskbar notification if I start the backup manually.
If that error happens on shutdown, the whole computer hangs. This is a serious shortcoming in ATI in my opinion. We have to forcibly power the PCs off.
The NAS is an inexpensive, single-disk device from Buffalo. No S.M.A.R.T. errors are reported. I tested the disk by writing and reading a large amount of verifiable data, and I found no problems. That does not mean that the NAS is fine though.
I have tried renaming the old backup repository on the NAS and creating a new one. After all, there is plenty of disk space left. With a new repository, backups are fine for a while, but the same problem happens again after a few days.
Is there a way to manually verify the consistency of the backup repository? I would like to find out where the error is, if that is possible. That may give me a clue about what is causing the corruption.
Now that I am looking at the backup system, I am worried whether the backups are consistent. I could find no documentation on what "backup on shutdown" means. Does that happen before or after stopping Windows services like the database server?
If the backup happens before the database service has stopped, or while it is being stopped, the backups cannot be trusted.
ATI apparently uses Windows Volume Shadow Copies / Volume Snapshot Service. I do not think that Gupta SQLBase provides a VSS writer for it. Even if it did, the next software probably will not. The future of VSS does not look rosy anyway.
The library only opens a few hours per week, so the PCs are shutdown often. What I really need is to take a VSS snapshot from the filesystem at the time the computer is off (that is, between shutdown and restart). This way, no service or application can have any file open, and the backup would then be clean.
Unfortunately, I could not find any way to create a VSS snapshot late on shutdown or early on startup, or at a given time (say midnight, when the PCs are always off). Backing up files that are normally in use seems hard, or maybe I have not found the right documentation yet.
Many thanks in advance for any help,
R. Diez
First of all, thanks for your reply.
As a new user, I was surprised that I did not get an automatic notification when you commented on this issue. Because my post was waiting for moderation, I did not get a clear URL to monitor. Fortunately, I did not forget that I asked this question, so I manually searched and now I found the "follow" button. But I still think that this is a shortcoming in your forum.
By the way, I encountered the following error several times trying to comment myself:
The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.
I wanted to point out that ATI 2013 is not "7 years obsolete", if the release date was 2013. Microsoft Windows versions have a lifetime of around 10 years. I am not sure it is realistic to expect that users upgrade their system backup solutions within the support lifetime of the operating system.
Anyway, I had a quick look at the ATI 2013 user guide you linked, and I found no reference to any "log". I also searched for "log" on the ATI 2020 documentation, to no avail. Where can I find such a message log, even if in newer versions? I could then perhaps figure out where to look in the older version.
An upgrade to ATI 2020 is for me out of the question if I do not get any answers to the VSS questions, or at least if there is not a reasonably easy way to stop services (and wait until they are stopped) before performing a system-wide backup. Otherwise, True Image is not a reliable backup solution, at least for my setup. Well, it is actually a pretty common setup: how are you going to reliably backup a whole Windows computer if you cannot ensure that no application and no services are using the files you are backing up?
See 'Viewing log' in the ATI 2013 User Guide - there is no such feature in ATI 2020 hence no mention of this in that user guide (something MVP's and users have been complaining to Acronis about for many years!).
ATI 2013 was released in 2012 and replaced by ATI 2014 in September 2014. Such earlier versions of ATI only ever received up to 30 days of Acronis Support from date of activation. This has changed since ATI 2018 where Acronis now give 1 year of support from date of release plus 30 days after the next version is released to the public. There is no direct tie between how Acronis supports its applications and the life cycle of Microsoft Windows versions.
There are many reasons why users are encouraged to upgrade applications such as ATI even within the life cycle of a Windows OS.
ATI 2013 & earlier versions did not use the Microsoft VSS snapshot feature - they used one that Acronis themselves produced. This changed in ATI 2015 (or thereabouts) to using MS VSS but still retained the ability to fall back on their own snapshot feature.
Computer hardware does not stand still during the life cycle of any OS. When ATI 2013 was produced, USB 3.0 wasn't generally available, SSD's were very new, NVMe M.2 was unknown etc.
New versions of ATI bring support into the application for these new technologies as well as supporting newer versions of Microsoft Windows and their technologies.
In terms how you should stop the services on your computer prior to running a system wide backup, sorry but that is and has always been a user responsibility to do. There is no functionality in ATI or other common backup applications that would do that for you unless you do the coding of the commands needed and put these into a Pre Command that will be executed prior to the backup being run.