Using TI 2018 - How To Move Backups To New Drive

Peter, welcome to these User Forums.

Please see the ATIH 2018 User Guide: Backup operations menu which gives the following description of the Move option in the drop-down menu for any backup task in the GUI.

Move - click to move all the backup files to another location. The subsequent backup versions will be saved to the new location.

If you change the backup destination by editing the backup settings, only new backup versions will be saved to the new location. The earlier backup versions will remain in the old location.

The actual process here is straight-forward to use.

First, connect the current backup drive that holds the backup files.

Next, connect the new backup drive that will be the target for the move operation and create any new target folder on that drive.  Make a note of the drive letter allocated to the new drive.
Note: I would recommend opening Windows Disk Management and allocating a drive letter that is lower down the alphabet so the new drive will keep the same drive letter each time it is connected.

Now, in the ATIH 2018 GUI, select the Move option for your backup task then select the new drive (and folder) for where the files should be moved to, then go ahead and perform the move operation.  ATI will move the files plus will update the Acronis Database with details of the new location in order to preserve your backup history etc.  Note: the move process can take some time to complete depending on the size of data and speed of transfer etc.

At the end of the move process, the GUI task should show the new destination location.

Thank you very much for your extended reply.

The problem I have is that I don't see any moving of existing files take place. The MOVE command does seem to change the backup task destination to the new drive, and subsequent backup runs do use it, but none of the older backups on the previous drive seem to get moved. They're still on the old drive, and not on the new drive, and as nearly as I can tell, Acronis doesn't initiate any action to change that - no task initiated or scheduled, no error messages or any messages at all.

Peter, can you give some more details of your old and new drives for this move question?  How are these connected etc?

I tried this myself but was only moving between 2 different partitions at that time.  There is no separate task or scheduled action involved here.  When I did my test, I simply got a panel showing the status of the move action which took a fair time due to the backups involved being over 20GB in size, but it was obvious that the move was being performed and all the files were moved from my source partition to the target one (and back again later too!).

I am wondering if the way your drives are connected, i.e. are any remote network drives involved?  Whether this makes a difference to how move works?  Also what is the size of backup data involved and the sizes of the 2 drives, including how much free space?

The additional detail is good, but I don't think I'm going to pursue this any further. I've already taken backups on the new drive, and it's too much trouble to try and change things back to try to reproduce or avoid the problem. I'll keep the old backups on the old drive for now, and in the unlikely event I need to use one, hope I can copy it and add it then.

FWIW, both external drives were USB 3.0 attached, though from different manufacturers. The backups were large, but not huge, and there should have been plenty of available space for them on the new drive.

It's likely the MOVE didn't work because I'd already changed something in my initial fumbles at trying to understand the MOVE command. (Do you know it never actually says the display of folders and drives you see after you click on MOVE is there so you can click on one as the new destination of the backup, and it lets you click on a folder on the original drive without telling you that's what you've done.)

Thanks again for your help. I'm sure any of my future attempts to use MOVE will go more smoothly. 

Peter, thank you for the update and feedback, hope all continues to run OK for you.

I am just a simple user of TI 2018, I make two full images a week, I don't bother with Incremental or Differential. A few times I have moved a TIB file with my File Manager from my external USB 3 drive to my internal 'D' drive and restored from there, worked perfectly. Maybe I am missing the point, I believe in the KISS principle.

Peter L, the OP was asking about the Move option in the ATI GUI that can be used to move all the backup files for a task to a new Destination location, all within the control of ATI so that both the GUI, the task script and the database are updated to reflect the changed location of files.

I recently attempted to move a backup to a location on another drive using the Move option inside TrueImage.  I experienced the same issue posted about earlier in the thread.  It was a full backup with a file size of around 2TB.  The destination drive had >5TB of free space.  After starting the move process the progress bar showed up on the screen indicating that the move was happening.  I went to bed expecting to find the file moved in the morning.  The next day the activity tab indicated that the backup had been moved without issue.  But the file was still located on the old drive.  Furthermore, the backup destination was still identified as being on the original drive.  

I tried to move the backup again.  But this time I was at the computer for the full duration of the process.  The status bar got to the end indicating that the move operation had been completed and the activity tab identified that the backup had been successfully relocated.  But once again the file had not actually been moved.  At this point I gave up and did a full backup to the new drive instead.

Where was the destination location before and after the move operation for the backup?

I have just tested doing a Move again and all worked as expected but for my test the destination was on a local partition and the move destination was to an external USB HDD drive.

I have a related question...If I move the backups to a new USB hard drive, do I need to create a new Rescue DVD or USB flash drive?  It's not clear to me how the Rescue DVD or USB flash drive finds the Backup drive (which, in my case, is on a (almost full) USB hard drive - hence the need to move backups to a new 8 TB USB drive)

(Right now, one of my computers (the one above) will not boot normally because its MBR was somehow damaged - which brings up another question: If I boot from the rescue DVD, it brings up the Windows 10, despite the fact that the MBR is trashed. How does it do that?)

BigIronPgmr wrote:

I have a related question...If I move the backups to a new USB hard drive, do I need to create a new Rescue DVD or USB flash drive?  It's not clear to me how the Rescue DVD or USB flash drive finds the Backup drive (which, in my case, is on a (almost full) USB hard drive - hence the need to move backups to a new 8 TB USB drive)

(Right now, one of my computers (the one above) will not boot normally because its MBR was somehow damaged - which brings up another question: If I boot from the rescue DVD, it brings up the Windows 10, despite the fact that the MBR is trashed. How does it do that?)

There should be no need to create a new Rescue DVD or USB drive.  When booted from this media, you need to navigate to where your backups are located using the panels shown in the offline ATI application.

The rescue DVD is in essence replacing the Windows Boot mechanism that would normally launch your Windows OS.

See webpage: Repairing A Broken Bootloader Or Master Boot Record In Windows 7, 8, And 10 for information on solving the damaged MBR.

Same problem I try to move the backup using the "▼Move..."  but it doesn't move and the destination doesn't change. The Activity log says "Backup was moved to \\Computer\Backups\MyComputer" (names changed) I have tried it several times.

Acronis says "Calculating time remaining" but after about a minute goes back to the normal Backup screen.

I also validated the backup and tried again. Both the original location and the required location are network shares not using a drive letter. The desired location is a subdirectory of a location with three exisiting backup subdirectories for other machines.

Richard, I know that the move option works with local destinations but I have never tried this with all non-mapped network shares, and am not in a position where I could try this at present.

I suspect that Acronis needs to already have established credentials for the new network destination for the move command, so if you are not being prompted to provide these, then this is probably a 'bug' (in terms of a scenario the developers haven't coded for).

If you create a new backup task to the move destination (even for a single folder), then this should provide the needed credentials for the move action.

As Richard above has indicated the "Move" command does not seem to work on network shares from a NAS device. I suspect it never has seeing this query though a number of versions and now being displayed in the all new 2020 version. Steve seems to believe there maybe a "credentials" issue and this could well be true since the program does not seem to "cache" credentials between processes. This may be by design. It should however at lest prompt for it. The errors maybe in the logs somewhere, but I'm not enough of a sysadmin geek to dig it out. I'm going to just cut and past the most recent old backup chain into the new location. LOL. 

Douglas, another user did report success in moving their backups to a new NAS recently (in the ATI 2020 forum methinks?) but the process they followed was to copy all the backups from their old NAS to the new NAS first, then use the Move option for the backup task in the GUI which then was happy to find the backups in the new NAS location.

The alternative approach would be to use the Delete option for the backup task in the GUI but only remove the task settings (not the files), copy the backup files outside of ATI, then use the option to 'Add existing backup' picking the most recent .tib file from the new NAS location, followed by reconfiguring the task settings and running either a new backup or validation.

I think there is a problem here, but the causal factors are complicated.

Recently (in the few days preceeding this posting) I have:

• Tried to move a backup from a local drive (K:\path...\folder) to a UNC location (\\Server\Share\path...\folder) and had it succeed. In fact, I've done this several times.
• Tried to move a backup from one UNC location (\\Server\Share\path...\folder) to another UNC location (\\Server\Share\path2...\folder2) and had it succeed. Note that the source server and share were the same as the destination server and share, but the paths within those were different. I was using credentials to access the source and destination, but because they were both on the same share, the source and destination credentials were the same.
• Tried to move a backup from a a local drive (K:\path...\folder) to a UNC location (\\Server\Share\path...\folder) and had it fail. When it failed, it accepted the destination path, returned to the main ATI window, briefly displayed the usual progress bar and "calculating" prompt, put up a message (suspiciously soon) saying that it had finished successfully, but actually did nothing (as evidenced by Windows File Explorer at the would-be destination). The activity tab said that the move had succeeded.

I think that what made the difference is that on the occasion when it failed, I had originally mis-specified the destination as being the same as the source. After that, specifying the correct destination doesn't work. I would guess that some internal data structure gets "stuck".

As others have mentioned, the workflow UI here is unhelpful. To do a "Move", I have to click the relevant backup job in the "Backups" list down the left. At this point I can see a partial path below the name of the backup job, and a full path if I hover over the partial path. So far so good. Then I click the drop-down icon and click "Move" on the menu. At this point, I see a dialog whose function is actually to specify the destination. But nowhere on the dialog does it say that. The title bar says "Browse for folder". The dialog defaults to showing me the source folder/path. The button in the bottom left is captioned "OK". Anyone might be forgiven for assuming that this dialog is for confirming the source, not the destination (even though sober reflection reveals that there is no need to confirm the source folder: ATI already knows the source folder).

IMO, the title bar would be better saying "Browse for Destination folder", the dialog showing no default folder/path at all (since there really isn't a sensible guess that ATI can offer) and the button caption saying "Move" (since that's what ATI does very next thing).

Making these changes is surely very easy, and would reduce the chance of anyone unintentionally specifying the same source and destination, which in turn reduces the chance of walking into any trouble if there is a bug here.

It would also seem sensible for ATI to check whether the source and destination are the same before starting the Move operation. Source = Destination is pretty clearly an error condition, not a valid user intention.

Tangentially related: I wonder why, in the main panel of the ATI UI, there is a path shown under the destination icon to the right of the blue arrow (along with the used and free space at the destination), but there is no corresponding path shown under the source icon, to the left of the blue arrow. To me, this seems like the obvious place to do a quick check of the source and destination of a backup job. Having to look in the Backups list for the source and the main panel for the destination seems to break a pretty obvious symmetry.