Acronis home 2011 backup never ended
I'm evaluating TI 2011. I started a "disk and partition backup" yesterday around 1pm. I have around 350gb on my hard drive. It was running when I went to bed at midnight. My USB target drive stopped and reconnected a number of times. This morning I woke up and there was a screen saying "your computer is performing operations and will shut down when it is finished" or something like that. When I came home around 4:30pm that was still running. I shut it down, and fortunately it rebooted. When I examined the target drive, there were several large files "partition_backup" maybe because my drive disconnected and reconnected several times. Did this restart the whole process each time? When I went to the TI 2011 software it said partition not backed up yet.
Is this what I should expect? I can't use a program with these issues. I read on another thread that there is an issue with how long it takes to validate. But I want to validate my backup but within a reasonable amount of time.
Incidentally, the same day I purchased a larger laptop for another computer, a laptop that had only a 60gb hard drive. The ebay seller sent me a link to a trial version of TI 2009 to clone my old drive. That version did it in a couple of hours, perfectly. Is there an issue with the latest version?
I basically want a program that will do good incremental data backups, and one that can create an image of my drive in less than 24 hours, Much less.
I have four computers I would buy licenses for once I chose the best software.
Quite possibly I did something wrong, or my external drive has a problem, but I'm not sure it does.
Thanks for your reply. It's a usb powered hard drive, i.e., no ac power, but it doesn't disconnect normally--but did several times during the disk imaging. What's odd, as I noted, is that I used a trial version of ti 2009 to clone to an external (also usb powered drive) on another computer. Maybe I'll try 2009 on this computer too, and see what happens. I'll also check the file format on the drive that's having problems.
I have also seen this when using a USB drive on another computer I have but thought it was a fault with the cable/connection as it was intermittent but seeing this thread I now suspect it is ATIH because I have not seen it happen when using other file copy software so far.
easy enough to check by trying a diff cable.
Already done that but it still happens on occasions usually when the I/O to the disk is high
I'd run chkdsk and memtest to make sure the probs aren't cused by a disk or mem prob. High IO shouldn't be an issue because the file system handles it.
I've used this usb external drive on three different computers with different cables, but this disconnect happened only when trying to write an image with ti 2011. As I noted, I used ti 2009 with another usb powered drive to clone a drive on another computer and I had no problem. (Incidentally, the drive is NTFS.)
Exactly
Does it happen with any other USB drive on this machine?
To follow up. As noted, two usb powered external hard drives had this disconnection problem while creating the (large) image. One of those two drives worked in creating the image (using a trial version of TI 2009) for a much smaller drive--about 40gbs.
But I also tried using one of the usb powered drives with some other imaging software I am evaluating on the large image and it also had the disconnecting-reconnecting problem. Finally, I used an AC-powered drive and there was no disconnect.
So the trial-and-error-evidence seems to point to problems with usb powered drives versus ac-powered drives.
Wondering if anyone else has had the same issue.
It does sound like a hardware prob. Do yu have other USB devices connected at the same time. ON some PCs, especially laptops, the avaialble current for the USB connections is limited, sometimes below the USB standard. All the USB devices on a PC are sometimes driven by the same power bus.
I have a keyboard, mouse, and printer attached via USB. It's a high end home-built machine with a 750 watt power supply, although the power apportioned via the power bus may make the size of the power supply irrelevant. I would like to know if anyone has successfully cloned a very large image to a usb-powered drive.
I've done all kinds of stuff with ati and sub drives. Had good luck with Toshiba and Seagate usb drives -- these being portables using laptop size harddisks. For any 5" portable usb drives, I think you generally will need an external power source. Only probs I ever had with the small diameter drives was when I had two usb drives plugged into the same usb buss (technically, mutliple pipes on the same usb host controller). Drives take a lot of current compared to most other usb devices. Usually if not enough current, then the drive won't be recognized at all. But if its a border line case, it can cause dropouts or disconnects. A USB port should be able to output a max of 500 mA but many ports are limited to 100 mA, especially on laptops. So-called low power units use only 100 mA (150 for usb 3) and the high power ones use the max. Some portable usb drives come with a siamese power connector so you can plug into the power on two usb ports -- on some machines this is necessary to get enough current for the drive to work correctly.
You might check that the connectors inside the pc as solid and clean -- of course, be sure everything is unplugged before you open up the box. Since usb runs on only 5 volts, it doesn't take much to impede the signal. If that doesn't solve your issue, then using a separate power supply to the drive is the quickest/simplest workaround.
My guess about your situation is that with prolonged writing to the drive, it heats up within a range that is safe for the drive but the bearings exert slightly more friction when hot, raising the drive's power requirements above the level your usb port can provide.
But again, it doesn't sound like an ati issue, per se, but a hardware issue, specifically, the usb drive not being adequately powered.
My USB Drive is AC powered and it goes AWOL when trying to back up to it. So it happens with both by the sound of it.
I've had no problems with external USB drives powered via the USB bus.
I have a number of external USB drives, but only two of them use 2.5" laptop drives and can be powered using the USB bus. The drives were assembled using Enermax Jazz enclosures and leftover drives after upgrading laptop hard drives to larger capacity ones.
What is important to note is that the Enermax Jazz enclosures come with a separate dual-headed USB power cable that may be necessary if the hard drive requires more current than what the USB bus can supply. As I said I've not needed the supplemental power cable, but some other drives may be on the edge of what USB can normally power.
Try moving the hard drive to another USB port or try unplugging some non-critical USB devices like printers, webcams, game controllers etc. during the backup. You can also review the power requirements of all the USB devices in Device Manager.