75GB Backup to NAS Fails at End "The operation is not supported"
I have been using (and fighting with) Acronis TIH for several years to backup my documents and photo to a NAS. Typically I configure a full backup every Sunday, with daily differential backups ("Create a full version after every 6 differential versions"). I also use the "automatic cleanup" to "Store no more than 4 recent versions", so I always have 4 weeks of backups available.
Everything seems to work fine for a while (several weeks to months), and then the automatic cleanup mysteriously stops working. I notice this as the NAS begins to fill up quickly (each full backup is 75GB). If I then go into Acronis TIH and select the "Recover" from the entry on the "Backup and recovery" tab, I am able to see the backup history. If I right click the oldest backup date and select 'Delete', typically the operation will fail (files not deleted) with no error message.
At this point things go down hill. I close TIH and manually delete the oldest Full and Differential backup files (the one(s) that TIH should have deleted automatically) to free up space on the NAS so that backups can continue. From this point on, it appears the TIH database is corrupt and there appears to be no way of fixing it. If I try to 'Verify" the backup set, that operation fails . If I try to 'Recover', I get a message that a version is missing, and if I elect to skip the version, I will be prompted one more time for the next version. If I skip the version again TIH is basically hung and the only way to proceed is to close it and re-open.
At this point, all new backups show the message "The last backup has failed", however the backup files appear to be ok (btw, I am using .zip format). If I open the log file I see the following entry at the end:
The operation is not supported.
The entry immediately preceding this is:
Updating backup database:
Removing verification requirement for database access.
Does the 'operation' in "The operation is not supported." refer to the preceding operation, even though that operation had a green check mark next to it in the log? If not, then this has to be one of the most meaningless log messages I have ever seen.
The only way to properly fix the issue is delete the backup set and configuration, and start over. I usually move the backup files to a new directory, and then start over until I have 4 weeks of data, then delete the old ones.
I have been dealing with this issue for several years now hoping that with each versions of TIH this bug will be fixed, but it never is. I can't believe I am the only one experiencing this.
Let me know if you have experienced this same behavior and have found a way to resolve it, or if more info is needed to help discover what is going on. I can post my log file entry that fails if that helps.
Thanks
Thanks for the response.
The NAS is on my home network and requires no login credentials. I believe I used Incremental initially (years ago), but still had issues. I have not tried it recently as I prefer Differential.
Not that I want you to move away from differential, but to diagnose the problem, you might want to try incremental with the same auto-cleaning options. If it works, we know that the deletion of versions in a differential backup might be the issue (some versions of ATI behaved badly in the differential deletion case and was corrupting the database and/or validatioin). If it fails also, you should try to backup to a USB disk to see if the problem is because of the NAS setup.
If the backup behaves normally on the USB Disk, you know that it is a NAS setup issue. In this case, if you not using login credentials, set up a new user on your NAS with full credentials and enter these credentials in ATI.
Finally, since you backup to a NAS, make sure that the recovery CD is seeing your NAS correctly and that you can actually recover a couple of files from your backup. Having ATI start the recovery in Windows does NOT guarrantee it will work.
To eliminate any issue with Differential or Incremental, I reconfigured my backup scheme to be Full only at once/week. I'll let that run for a while and see if I have any issues with the Cleanup or strange log errors (does anyone know what that log message actually means?).
Regarding the recovery from a boot CD, I'm not too concerned about that. I chose zip as my file format because 1) Based on my experience thus far, I don't trust the ATI software to perform as it should if I need to run recovery, so I want to be able to use other tools to recover my data if necessary, and 2) Using zip allows me to change backup software down the road and still be able to access my old archives if necessary.
btw, I also backup my entire C: partition (an SSD) to an internal HDD, and have had to recently restore the partition to a new drive due to my SSD dying. That process worked flawlessly.
I've been considering dumping ATI all together and simply using one of the cloud drive services to archive my files. While this may not be as transparent, I think I will spend less time managing my backups.
I see. We are talking about a file backup. And you use ZIP. Then, yes, you don't need to worry about the recovery CD in that case.
Don't know what the log error could mean.