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Cannot Delete backup

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I believe I may have really messed up things in my update to Acronis True Image 2017

 

Below, when I say "the backup" I an referring to the object that is listed in the ui when the "Backups" tab is clicked and it displays a source ("Disks and Partitions") and destination ("External Drive").

Background:

I have had Acronis True Image for some time and just upgraded to Acronis True Image 2017.  When I went to the new Acronis UI I noticed that my external 1TB hard drive (USB Connected) (K:) backup was very old.  The previous version of the product had never notified me of issues so I had assumed all was OK.  I could not get that (K:) backup to run.

I purchased another, larger (4TB USB 3.0 connected to USB 2.0 port) external drive and still found the original back up would not run.  I expected to see the "I" in the blue circle between the source and destination and instead there continued to he a red circle with an "X".

I cloned a new backup to the same drive.  That didn't seem to be anything I could run either. So I created an entirely new backup (again to the new USB-connected K: drive).  That one looked good so I told True Image to start the backup.  I left it running overnight.

Came back in the morning and found that the original backup (which had previously shown as a red X) had run the clone had run, and the newly created one was still running.  My 4 TB drive had gone from empty  to 92% full.  All that from a 0.6 TB source!  Obviously, I do not understand the product.

Current state:

It appears I have created at least three duplicate full backups and nearly filled up my new previously empty external drive when All I wanted to do was create an initial full system backup then do daily incrementals.  Your documentation for the product is not at all helpful.

I assumed I needed to delete some of those redundant backups.  So I took the first one of the previously used backups and clicked on the DELETE (with all files option).  That was 3 hours ago.  All I am getting is the "Deleting Backup progress box with the three moving dots - for over three hours).

1.  Is this supposed to  take so long?

2.  Would it be better if I reformatted the external drive and reinstalled the product and then deleted the backups

3.  Is there any way I can just start everything over from a clean slate (clean disk, clean True Image)? 

I simply do not understand your new "user friendly" product. 

Should I just try to find another backup product that I can figure out how to use,

0 Users found this helpful

Richard, welcome to these User Forums.

I would recommend doing the following for your duplicate backup tasks:

  • Take the Delete option for each duplicate task in turn, but when doing this, select to only Remove the task settings from the ATIH 2017 GUI, leaving the files where they are on your external drive.
  • Open Windows / File Explorer and delete the orphaned backup files from the external drive.

If you want to make a completely clean start, then do the above for all of your backup tasks then start again by creating your backup tasks and selecting the external drive as the backup destination.

When creating a new backup task, ATIH defaults to showing 'Entire PC' for the Source data, click on this and you will get more granular options, i.e. to select Disks & Partitions, or Files & Folders.

I would recommend using Disks & Partitions and selecting only a single Disk for a backup task - this keeps any future recovery actions as simple as possible by not having to choose between multiple drives (if you have such installed).

Note: the cleanup actions suggested above are only for this scenario where you want to remove duplicate tasks / files.  If you delete backup files using File Explorer for active Acronis backup tasks, then you should always perform a Validation of the task that created the deleted files in order to reconcile the information stored in the internal Acronis metadata Database files.  Validation will show a pop-up error for each deleted file encountered that you would then need to take the Ignore option for. 

Thanks for the response.

There is also a DUH!  I realized that there were apparently not any actual duplicate backups to the external drive.  I misread the notice on the external drive as saying I had 3.30 TB left out of a max capacity of 3.6TB.  My eyes failed me.  That was actually telling me that I had 3.3TB REMAINING FREE out of 3.6TB!

Also, it appears that the reason the Complete Delete on the two backup settings which were duplicates was because they had no files to delete and, apparently the software did no know how to deal with that situation other than to remain in a perpetual "deleting" mode.

Richard, thanks for the feedback, glad that the issue was one of a simple misunderstanding rather than something more serious!