Acronis TrueImage Home 2010 - Scheduled Tasks Question / Missed backups

Product: Acronis TrueImage Home 2010 - Win XP

Hello,

Wouldnt mind some insight or thoughts on the below ... pretty typical of a home setup and just wanting to know whether the product is not made for this or whether there is something wrong in the way I am doing it.

The two issues are:
- Notification of missed backups
- Running of missed backups

I am using the trial version of Acronis TrueImage Home 2010 on Windows XP .. downloaded 2 weeks ago to see whether it fits my needs, I love the functionality.

I have a NAS at home which isnt turned on all the time (probably like most home users) where I backup to. I have successfully setup a few taks to backup my hdds to the NAS over the network ... which work when the NAS is on. Backup location is just a mounted network drive.

Just to test what would happen I scheduled the tasks for when the pc wasnt turned on / NAS wasnt turned on. This is the "what if I forget / how automatic is it going to be" scenario.

The backup tasks in TI Home 2010 seem to start fine when the pc was turned on next .... but didnt cope at all with the NAS not being online. Backup task started to run, but then got an error as the NAS was offline "The specified user name or password for remote resource '{0}' is incorrect. Check the username and password and retype them" .. which is perfectly understandable if the network drive isnt mounted / available to backup to as the NAS isnt on.

What I was planning to do was setup backups to run once a month .. say last day of the month etc... and then when required or ideally reminded to do so .... turn on the NAS and let them all run.

It seems though that the backups just all fail if the NAS drive isnt available (which is fine), but I dont get any notification in the system tray or otherwise... its only when I open TI Home 2010 and look in "tasks & log" do I see they failed ....

So thats the first issue ... notification of missed backups.

Also even though I have 4 tasks setup ... one for each hdd partition I want to backup .... I cannot easily kick off all 4 tasks manually it seems ... I can only click on one of the tasks (in this case per hdd partition) and kick them off manually one by one. I have them setup like this as ultimately I may want to backup my digital photos etc stored on hdd partition 3 more frequently than the system disk.

If I manually kick them off, if one takes 5 hrs to complete, then I have to then wait for taskl 1 to finish and manually start task 2 ... and so on to task 4 which is a major pain depending on whether you are cycling through an incremental or full backup.

So this is issue 2 ... the running of missed backups is a pain manually .... why cant I just say run them all and leave it alone to run them 1 by one.

Oh... and I assume regarding the scheduler that I can set 4 seperate backup tasks to start at the same time .. say last day in the month ... 8pm ... and they will just follow each other after the one before it has finished ..... or will task 2 fail if task 1 is currently running?

Any ideas or help with this one?