ATHI2014 can't find Version 1

This has worked for me in 2016 - might apply in 2014 as well:

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/125659#comment-389959

Hi Bobbo,

thanks for your quick reply. I understand you are referring to this advice:

Dmitry Nazarov wrote:

Hello, everyone!

If you're having the "Please locate the last volume..." issue when opening backups in Windows Explorer - try deleting all the files in C:\Users\[your_username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Database 

This may help resolve the issue.

I tried to drill down along the designated path. However, the folder "ProgramData" is empty (besides info from another application), nothing from Acronis to be found there.

Is it possible to search for the data base in question ? I would then need its name or at least parts thereof.

B.t.w. - my Acronis isn't missing the last volume, it's the first one. And it's not when opening a backup in Windows Explorer, it's when starting the Recovery Assistant in ATIH2014.

It's getting more and more strange.

This morning I played around a bit with the recovery assistant. Got the same message "Can't find version 1" as before. Klicked "Ignore" and got the same again. Clicked "Ignore" again and again (between 15 and 20 times). Then all of a sudden the recovery assistant offered me the 9 backup archives actually present on that drive, to select one of them to recover from. I stopped there, because I didn't intend to really recover anything.

I repeated this with another one of my 3 external drives. Same behaviour - 9 clicks on "ignore" this time until the assistant continued.

I'm deeply concerned about such behaviour. I don't believe that my heart would survive the stress of going through this try and pray procedure when in a real disaster situation. (And of course I have no idea whether the behaviour will be similarly "successful" when starting the recovery process from a rescue media rather than from a running Windows system.)

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As to the issue of avaoiding all this in the future:

So far I have created and configured one backup job for these full backups and I'm using it on whichever backup drive happens to be connected (which results in spreading the versions all over the different drives). Should I instead create 3 separate but identical backup jobs for the 3 drives and use always the same job for a particular drive (resulting in having all versions on one drive, at least as I'm not messing up jobs vs. drives) ?

I'm clearly not in favour of this - I'd rather prefer to get rid of this "version" nonsense entirely. But I urgently need a solution that is at least reliable.

ChrisG wrote:

So far I have created and configured one backup job for these full backups and I'm using it on whichever backup drive happens to be connected (which results in spreading the versions all over the different drives). Should I instead create 3 separate but identical backup jobs for the 3 drives and use always the same job for a particular drive (resulting in having all versions on one drive, at least as I'm not messing up jobs vs. drives) ?

Chris, if you are using the same backup task to write to 3 different backup drives then this is at the heart of the problem you are seeing!  Acronis stores drive information in a database file where it records the unique identifier (UUID) for the drive that you configure as destination for the task.  Each time you swap to a different drive you present a different UUID and the database gets at best confused, at worst corrupted.

Acronis Home products are not designed to be used in this way with a single task using multiple backup drives.

You should create a separate task for each backup drive, and keep these completely different by also having different drive letters pre-allocated for the different drives too.  Windows will allow you to change drive letters via Disk Management and you should pre-allocate letters from towards the end of the alphabet to avoid conflicts with other USB devices that you may plug in to your computer.   This issue has been raised many times in these forums across all recent versions with the same type of problems being reported caused by it.

Steve,

thanks for your clarification, I was thinking just too simple - expecting a full backup being just one file written somewhere and containing everything it needs for being recovered ...

It will take a little time until I have followed your advices and refurbished my entire set of backup rules and configurations and gathered some experience. I'll then report here.

I'm still in the process of trying to understand what the heck ATIH2014 is really doing and what my consequences should be from that. From playing around now for a while the following seems to have emerged:

1. I should create one backup task 3 specifically for only one physical backup target drive.
2. To avoid mismatch between backup tasks and their respective physical target drives, Steve proposes to assign different drive letters to each physical drive. However, so far I have been unable to accomplish that in Windows 10. When changing the drive letter from E: to Z: for one backup drive, the next drive connected to that PC appears as Z: as well. Changing that one to Y: makes also the first one appear as Y:. In order to avoid mismatches between backup tasks and drives nevertheless, I should add the drive number to the name of the target directory on each drive (e.g. "E:\BU3 from PC6 (Chris Notebook)" on drive 3)
3. This backup task, once readily defined, is then cloned twice, each clone then being adapted to one of the two remaining backup drives by changing only the backup name (of course) and the destination for the backup archive files (according to the above).
4. In order to get rid of Acronis' version management ("Can't find version 1"), I should never run these backup tasks more than once. For each new backup activity I should create yet another clone of the drive-specific backup task (this time without changing anything in the task) and run the backup with this "fresh" clone, again only once in its life.
5. When deleting backup archives (e.g. when running out of space on a backup drive) I should do this using Acronis' built-in delete function (files and settings) rather than simply doing it in the Windos file explorer.

Does this all make sense ? Is there any other (=simpler) way to get rid of Acronis' version management ? I think I somehow understand the idea behind that version management - keep the first version permanently and delete the oldest ones of the subsequent versions if the backup drive is running out of space. But that scheme seems unrealistic to me. When setting up a computer and frequently drawing backups it may turn out much later that it's version #2 which is worth being kept permanently rather than just #1 which happens to have been captured first. Or even keep versions #2, 5 and 9 permanently to have different fallback levels in place (e.g. #2: bare operating system setup, #5: all my standard applications installed, #9: after a major platform change like Windows 8.1 => 10). ATIH2014 doesn't appear to support such flexible demands. But I insist on maintaining full control over my backup data.

Finally: Would I be better off migrating to ATIH2017 (after giving it at least half a year to mature) ? Would that improve the above situation ? Or would it  just add more nebulous features to the same unresolved basic complications ?

Sorry, tons of questions after having used Acronis for at least one decade ...

Chris, let me try to set this out a little simpler as some of your points above are not correct.

If you have the possibility to do so, then connect all three of your backup drives to your computer at the same time.  They will each then be given a different drive letter.  From this position, you should then be able to change these drive letters to further down the alphabet as needed without them being give the same letter as another drive.

Once you have the drive letters sorted out, then create a new backup task to write to each of these drives using their unique drive letters.

Each backup task should ideally have a unique task name, e.g. Backup_drive_M; Backup_drive_O; Backup_drive_Q - you can do this by creating the first backup task then cloning the settings for the second and third, ensuring that you select the correct destination drive for each one.

With the new tasks created, then remove the settings for any old tasks that was writing to these three drives, so that they do not try to write to any of these drives or confuse matters in the internal Acronis database.

That should be all that is needed.  You do not need to keep creating clones of tasks after running it once (your step 4.)

You should use the Acronis automatic cleanup rules to manage the size of backup data on the backup drives, but if you do delete any files using Windows Explorer, then run a validation for the backup task that created the files you delete - this will reconcile the Acronis database with the state of actual remaining files present.

Versions are an integral part of how Acronis works and can be used for your benefit - the reason why you may get errors for missing versions is simply because the database is out of sync with the files present - again running validation can help resolve this.  

Automatic cleanup works with versions, allowing you to specify how you want to manage versions, i.e. to store no more than X recent versions, or to remove versions older than YY days (where the days are only counted after the next new version has been created successfully).

Steve,

thank you very much for your detailled advices.

I understand your concerns with my "cloning" ideas. Although yesterday I did manage to get that working somehow it doesn't seem to be a good basis for robust backup procedures in every day situations. I'll reconsider ATIH's built-in version management options again, thinking that it's better to accept one of them as it is, without my additional manipulations. I still find these options far away from meeting my real needs, but it seems better to live with an imperfect backup strategy applied consistently rather than designing what I believe is my perfect strategy but ending up with corrupted data, as I did already.

As to connecting all 3 drives in parallel during the setup phase - my notebook has only 2 USB connectors (one USB 3.0 and one 2.0). Do you think that buying a simple USB hub could resolve this ? (I understand that throughput is not an issue because the hub would be used only for setting up the three backup tasks but not for massive data transfer.)

Chris, if you are going to use an USB hub then I would recommend going for a powered hub to ensure that there is enough power for the devices you connect, otherwise you may cause the computer to disable the USB port to safeguard your system.  As you have a USB 3.0 port, then a matching USB 3.0 hub would be a good choice, assuming you are connecting USB 3.0 drives.

Yes, will buy a powered hub. All three drives (3 TB each) have USB 3.0 Ports. Thanks !

Hi there, I'm back (with some delay due to vacation and other priorities). So far I did the following:

• bought a powered USB 3.0 hub for my three USB 3.0 backup drives and connected all of them simultaneously to my notebook - wow, what an impressive setup on my desk ! :-)
• configured the drive letter to be Z:, Y: and X: for drive 1, 2 and 3, respectively.
• verified that subsequently each drive is addressed by its correct drive letter regardless of how many drives are connected.
• created three new, different backup jobs, one for each drive, this time using the cleanup option keeping the first backup plus the latest 10.
• ran each backup task once on its associated drive so that there is now one first backup version on each drive
• restored, from one of these brandnew backups, all volumes (except the separate one carrying all my data files - too valuable for gambling "russian roulette" with Acronis). When starting the recovery process from Windows+Acronis this seems to have worked fine (I say "seems" because in the end I can't say for sure whether the system running correctly afterwards really is the restored image or whether nothing happended at all and I was ending up with the original sytem never touched by the recovery procedure. But since the clumsy Linux GUI was busy for quite a couple of minutes I guess it was a real and then successful recovery.
• repeated that recovery from a rescue medium (USB memory stick prepared by Acronis earlier today), but that FAILED entirely ! (see below)

The log associated with that failing recovery reads as follows (= my translation from the German log text)

1. info: recovery started
2. info: restore backup archive from file "bla.bla"
3. info: remaining action 12 has started: 'copy partition'
4. error: action on partition 1-1 canceled. Details: change of size not possible
5. error: change of size not possible
6. error: recovery failed

Maybe I should mention that the (SSD) partitions existing on that notebook had been created initially using Samsung's proprietary recovery tool for this. I remember that I once had problems during setup of this computer three years ago when first using Windows' built-in drive management.

The following may also be worth mentioning. When restoring under Windows+Acronis I was asked only which volumes to restore and off it went. When restoring from the rescue medium I was additionally asked all kinds of configuration stuff for (target ?) drives and volumes. As I had no idea what so select there and as the drive numbers and volume letters appeared totally scrambled (which seems expected since mentioned by the Linux GUI), I always blindly pressed the "apply" button hoping that at least Acronis has an idea (if not myself) what the heck it was proposing to me. Was that a mistake ? I can't remember that I had similar problems with earlier ATIH versions, the latest one being ATIH 2010. But maybe it's just my progressing age ...