Twice a day backup test is producing odd results with sleeping system.
The test: I created an incremental disk/partitions backup of my laptop C: drive to F:, a USB thumb drive left in the machine. It is scheduled for 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. I also am leaving the laptop to its own so it is quite often asleep or hibernating. Advanced options set are
- Wake up the sleeping/hibernating computer
- Prevent the computer from going to sleep/hibernate
- Run missed operations at system startup with delay (5 minutes)
Error handling is set for 5 retries at 30 second intervals.
After a couple days, I am finding that the backup is generally failing unless I specifically bring the laptop out of sleep mode.
Looking at the ti_demon logs, here is what I found...
10/10 8:00 pm: Failed
10/11 12:25 am: Failed
10/11 12:31 am: Failed
10/11 12:36 am: Failed
10/11 12:42 am: Failed
10/11 12:47 am: Failed
10/11 09:31 am: Failed -- system manually brought out of sleep
10/11 09:37 am: Succeeded
10/11 08:00 pm: Failed
10/12 07:59 am: Failed
10/12 08:00 am: Failed
10/12 09:10 am: Failed -- system manually brought out of hibernation
10:12 09:15 am: Succeeded
10:12 12:01 pm: Succeeded -- system just rebooted
All errors are the same... "The backup location was not found on the destination drive. ..."
It seems as though it cannot find the file on F: unless the system is manually brought out of sleep mode, but then it still fails on first attempt and succeeds five minutes later.
Looking at the Schedul2 logs is giving me a headache. When it's trying to start the backup, it could try for one of the following reasons... TIM_NORMAL, TIME_DELAY or RETRY_FAILED. It kinda hard to figure out what's what there. It seems it will do only one retry on failure after 30 seconds, but then it seems to kick off the five minutes after system restart timer, although don't know what restart is happening, especially in the middle of the night. But if the system is awake, that one works.
I sent a feedback with system report asking to look into this task and the logs. Meanwhile, I'll leave it for a few more days to see what may happen.
A little follow up...
At 8:00 pm the PC was sleeping. The ti-demon log shows a failure at that time.
Just after 10:00 pm I woke up the computer. There are ti_demon failure logs at 10:02 pm, 10:08 pm, 10:13 pm, 10:19 pm and 10:24 pm. The screen shots below show what the UI was saying during that time as each attempt was failing. Note that each one shows the next scheduled backup for 8:00 am tomorrow, yet the error message does not make much sense.
What the scheduler is doing really does not make sense either. Looking at the Schedul2 logs it seems that each failure noted in ti_demon logs also reflects one additional failure on retry after 30 seconds. But only one, not five.
So as it sits now, there is no 8:00 pm.
How about creating a new task with exactly the same options (and new destination folder) and see if it works? That should help indicate whether it's a corrupted task definition (and/or something related to it in the database) or whether ATI just cannot handle the seemingly valid task definition.
Or try a "twice a day" backup scheduled where the two backups are not 12 hours apart. With most of the world using a using 24 hour scheme, maybe ATI has trouble handling the 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM schedule. (Unlikely, but it would be good to rule it out.)
I changed two settings on the task.
1. I deselected "Run missed operations at system startup..."
2. I selected "Run missed operations when an external device is connected."
The result is that the system worked as expected. My 8:00 pm backup was done as planned at 8:00, even thought the system was sleeping before that.
I suspect it was item 1 above that solved it. I just deselected the second one to see if it backs up correctly at 8:00 tomorrow morning. If so, then I would say that the "Run missed operations at system startup" can cause havoc with the scheduler.
The 8:00 am backup went off without a hitch. So my conclusion is that "Run missed operations at system startup..." is very problematic. I can sort of understand all the scheduling being out of whack, but cannot understand why it would keep failing to find the backup location.
One more check... I re-enabled the "Run missed operations at system startup..." last night and then hibernated the computer. This morning, after 8:00 am, I started up the machined and the backup had succeeded as it should. Now I'm doubly confused.
BrunoC wrote:I can sort of understand all the scheduling being out of whack, but cannot understand why it would keep failing to find the backup location.
This is almost certainly an error in ATI error recovery prompting it to give the wrong error message. It's almost certain that ATI could actually find your thumb drive if it tried (unless Windows cannot find it). Why ATI is in any error recovery routine at that point is puzzling.
As I had reported in a recent forum posting, I had experienced the twice-daily external drive backup problem. However, in my case the backup simply did not show up as scheduled and therefore did not run at all. It did not report any problems with finding the backup location, but since the backup didn't run at all, that doesn't really mean much.
After deleting and recreating the entire backup scheme, the new backup has been running without a problem for 4 days now. The computer is set to go to sleep when idle and ATIH-2020 is set to wake a sleeping computer. It is also set to run missed operations upon system startup after waiting 5 minutes.
Yes, MrVivona... I was actually trying to recreate your issue when this happened. Because the symptoms were so different I started a new topic.
I'm still monitoring the task. Thought it was failing again tonight, but I had removed the drive and forgot to put it back in so it failed appropriately. We'll see what happens tomorrow.