Cannot establish connection. Check the specified machine address. - timeout errors with local disk on AMS

PS. I have several other backups running to another drive on the USB connection into other vaults which complete fine. (they are scheduled not to overlap)

Hello Hilton,

thank you for your posting!

Can you please create a system report as it is described here and upload it to our FTP-Server?

Thank you.

After several months of trying to track down the cause of the failed backup, I have finally traced this error to a Bluetooth network service that was trying to start and failing.

The Broadcom Bluetooth network service that was failing to start was disrupting backups. With It disabled the backup completed normally.
(PS. im not using BT networking for anything so I just disabled it)

I disabled the Bluetooth network adapter and changed the following registry key to stop the service from trying to start.
I changed the start registry key for my system in HKLM\System\ControlSet001\Services\BCM42RLY from the value 3 to the value 4 and it seems to have solved the problem.

When the BT network service failed to start the backup also failed because the backup momentarily lost connectivity as the network stack restarted. It's a bit of a strange one though, because the centralised backup vaults are locally connected to the same machine as disk being backed up. I guess the backup vault must be still using network paths even though it's locally connected.

It's also a little bit weird that the backup cant gracefully recover from a momentary network connectivity loss and keep going.

With the Bluetooth network service failing, the backup that's running fails and wont resume with a retry either, but cancelling the backup and restarting it does work without a reboot. (until the Broadcom Bluetooth network service that was failing tried to start again in another 24 hours)

I also noted this behaviour if you stop and re-start the AMS managed machine service or the management server service on the backup server.
When stopping and restarting the services though, it won't recover at all, it permanently looses connectivity to the vault until a system reboot.

I had this issue looked at remotely by support a couple of times and loaded my logs for review and they suggested some things that didn't fix the issue.
It seems it would be good for future trouble shooting if the first thing you do is collect windows system event logs as well as the Acronis logs and look at the both sets of logs for any errors or issues occurring at the same time in both logs. It was very apparent this was the issue for me once I checked the system logs as the system error occurred the same time as the Acronis error over several failed backups.

Cheers

Hello Hilton,

thank you for sharing your experiences!

Hi just an update on the above error.
I found another culprit in my system creating a windows system event error that was triggering the same failed backup message.

I have a netgear router doing DHCP duties on my network and use reserved IPs for all my machines including the backup server.
Unfortunately there's a bug in the Netgear firmware that causes a DHCPNACK when an IP renewal occurs on a reserved IP address.

The router should respond with an ACK and not a NACK. The NACK causes the network stack to completely restart and Acronis cant recover from this even though network connectivity is only dropped for a few seconds while the IP renews. If the router worked as it should, it should just send an ACK and renew the IP lease without triggering a network stack restart because the address is already reserved. (other DHCP routers or servers don't trigger this problem with reserved IPs)

The fix with the netgear routers is to use static IP addresses on your machines, which you would normally do in a corporate server environment anyway, but as most home users small business users just use DHCP this could be a common problem in the home or small business environment.

It would be nice if Acronis could work on the software so it could recovery gracefully from a network interruption like this, even though it's not an Acronis problem, there are lots more scenarios where momentary network interruption or network stack restarts could cause backup failures.

The good news is that the previous BT error that was causing failed backups has not resurfaced and disabling the BT registry has indeed fixed that problem.
Hopefully the static IP will address the failed backup errors for good now! ;)

PS. This issues was tracked down in less than 5 mins by looking at the system event logs for an error at the same time as the Acronis error log.