Backup stuck in queued

I would guess that ATI had problems with how the USB disk showed as being failing, or whether the drive just basically ignored all attempts to talk to it?

In this situation, I would recommend killing the problem task then using the 'Clone settings' option to create a new one that you can point at the new / replacement drive location.  Each drive has its own unique identifier (UUID) so would not be enough to fool ATI by just giving the new drive the same letter etc.

You can try ending all Acronis Services (do first) then stopping any Acronis Tasks before using the clone option when the task is not trying to run or in queued status.

If that doesn't work, then you will need to use the Acronis Schedule Manager (link in my signature) to kill the queued task.  This uses a long task script name that you can find either by using the MVP Log Viewer tool (which shows this in the log name), or else checking the C:\Program Data\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts folder to find the name via the associated script .tib.tis file.  The file is an XML text file that you can open with Notepad and find the task name near the top of the file.

On the email notification, it may have something to do with how the email trigger is defined. Various triggers would include, successful, successful but with some errors, failed to complete, and finally failed to run (meaning hopefully including stuck in the queue). Are you using account wide emails or emails in the task itself - if the task does not run, then no email would be generated (speculation on my part).

Ian

Steve, The first clone technique did not work. The cloned task would not even start until after a reboot and then the same thing. I have to say I'm unclear about the Scheduler Manager you pointed to and there is no C:\Program Data folder on my system. I tried setting the destination to a different device in the cloned task but that did not work either. It always simply queues.

I did clone the task the other day and set it to a full monthly backup on a different device and that did work. I also moved an old backup from that device to the new disk and that worked. So why would the full backup clone work and not the daily incremental clone? Any additional help would be appreciated.

edit: There is no space between Program and data. That confused me.

IanL-S, I have never been able to get the email notification to work (that's why no notification). I worked with GoDaddy for a while yesterday but was never able to send a test message. According to GoDaddy there have been many problems with getting Acronis email to work. But beside email why don't I get a system notification?

I have never tried specifying email notifications when setting up a backup task. It can be quite difficult. Steve Smith uses such notifications so he may be able to be of assistance.

I use the global email notification setting: Open ATI, go to Settings, click on the "Change email notification settings" under the Notification heading.

Ian

See KB 59265: Acronis True Image 2017: how to set up email notifications about backup status - for details of setting up email notifications.  The key point for me is not to use the default SSL settings as these are considered insecure by most ISP's - use TLS with port 587 which works fine with Gmail that I use with an account purely for this one purpose.

IanL-S, thanks. I never knew that existed. I don't use the cloud for much of anything as I'm an old school kind of person. I like the tangible stuff in my hands. Perhaps you can tell me how to get email notifications from this message board when I post a question. I thought I would be automatically subscribed to a thread I started. Notify me when new comments are posted is checked.

Notifications are useful - when they work. For many months they did not work but now appear to be working reliably.

At the bottom of the "post" dialogue box there is notification section - You can select notification of "All comments" or "My comments" you can see from the screenshot that I have selected all comments. The screenshot shows you post, and I was doing the replay to it and the notification selection was at the top.

Hope this helps.

Ian

You should also check your Acronis Account profile settings by clicking on My account at the top of the forum pages, then Edit Profile and scroll down where you will see the following options:

Thank you both. It looks like one of my posts disappeared. I was able to circumvent the issue by creating a new backup specifying the same files and to the same backup destination. Not a clone, mind you, but a new backup task from scratch. It seems Acronis is very good at what it is supposed to do but not so good when there are issues. It would be nice if there were more tools to help resolve a problem. Especially a disk failure because that has to be a common one.

HDD failure is something that can undo a backup strategy. HDDs have a limited life-span, and it is difficult to manually check their health. I use HardDisk Sentinel to monitor disk on my PCs. For critical data I have multiple backups, to USB drives, internal HDD, to my NAS and to Acronis Cloud.

I have had a few HDD crash on me in the last year. I did not have backups, but the content was such that it was not worth backing up. In each case the disk was more than 5 years old and in one case had been used intensively for several years. I was about to say that I have never had a SSD fail of its own accord - I did have have two SSDs that were "killed" by a failing power supply and I think a third may have actually failed. 

Not sure what Acronis can do to assist in identifying potential HDD failure - which is arguably outside its scope.

Ian

IanL-S. I believe you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'm not talking about a failing or failed system disk, I'm referring to a disk used by Acronis for backups. It is a backup disk that failed and I was unable to use that backup task again even after replacing the disk and cloning the task. I was forced to create a new backup task from scratch. What I'm saying is that Acronis should be able to deal with a failed backup disk.

In this case perhaps Acronis should be able to recognize there is an issued with the backup destination disk or at least open a dialogue that asks the user some questions. Something like not being able to communicate with the disk for, say, two backup sessions (user settable perhaps). Is the disk still connected? Has the disk failed, been replaced, or direct the backup to a different disk. Warn the old backups will be lost in the process and the task will start as a new task. I'm just offering my opinion.

Before I retired I worked at AT&T Labs as a system engineer and administrator for three internal minicomputer to super computer labs. Maybe I'm just accustomed a higher level product. I do recall several versions back Acronis had built in features where you could do some troubleshooting and maintenance. Not sure why they dumbed it down.

I understand your frustration as expressed above but this needs to be directed to Acronis by either using the Feedback tool in the GUI or else via opening a Support Case.  Many users have complained about the dumbing down of ATI over recent versions, especially with removing the direct Log access within the GUI.

This particular case may be a little harder to deal with as disk failures, whether for the source or destination drives, are not as common as perhaps they have been in the past (hopefully due to more reliable technologies) and the manner in which disks exhibit a failure can be varied and difficult to predict.  I agree that the application should be able to recover from such a scenario, including that using the 'clone settings' option should not carry over any referenced to the original disk drive unique identifiers if possible / that reselecting a new / replacement drive should resolve such references to the new drive.

One further options that is currently open to you would be to participate in the ATI 2019 Beta testing and see what differences that offers in handling this type of scenario (assuming it is still possible to recreate).  This would give you the option to provide feedback on any issues found / make suggestions for improvements in this latest proposed version prior to it hitting the streets!
Note: not sure how much longer the Beta will be running for as Acronis normally look to a September announcement date for new versions?

Just for clarification, I understood the issue was potential failure of the target drive.

One possibility would be for Acronis to read the smart status of the target drive and send a waning if there is anything amiss. Not sure how far that would go to isolating all potential instances of drive failure.

Ian

IanL-S, For me, the bottom line is Acronis should have the tools and ability to recover from a failed or failing destination drive. Source drive not so much but it's not too much to expect. My guess is their professional products have this ability at a higher cost. Since tools like this were removed sever releases ago from the home product I doubt they will ever be offered again.

I have a manual tool called CrystalDisk that can show the status of the drives. When I used it I discovered one of my older source drives is failing. It's from my last PC that could not handle Windows 10 and was about 8 years old. I just put it in my new PC when I built it so I could recover any data I wanted from it. Perhaps I can find a tool that can monitor the disks periodically and notify me if one is failing. Acronis still NEEDS to be able to recover from a failed target drive.

Failed drives happen, it is a fact of computing.  The best tool to monitor drive health is Hard Disk Sentinel.  It can monitor all current modern day drives including those that are PCIe based.  The app runs on startup and can display an overview of installed drive health almost immediately.  It also has advanced features.  I recommend it.

It is also good practice to make more than one backup of your data and store them in multiple places.  This way you are not relying a a single backup.

I will look into HD Sentinal but from what I can see it does the same thing as CrystalDisk. I discovered that CrystalDisk can also run in the background with notifications. Thanks for the tip. I do make system backups to multiple locations. My daily incremental and monthly full. Most of the files I back up are part of the system disk but some are not. I should clone my working files backup task and set it as a monthly to a different disk.

Sounds like a plan, keyword, plan.  With a solid plan things like disk failures become irrelevant.  I'm sure you will develop a plan that meets your needs :)

OK, I had the same problem with TI 2018 latest version so that the scheduled jobs were queued but not proceeding.

First, I checked that I had access to the external disk and could view the backup files from each of my two jobs (disk C backup and disk D backup).

Next, after spending a lot of time researching knowledge base, support, and this forum, I then moved to the next step to resolve the problem.

Next/Last step was to open the From->To backup setting, set the destination location as D: (without saving) and then resetting the destination to my external backup disk (F:) and saving.  This resolved the problem and my backups are again proceeding.

It would be good to learn how to flush the job queue which would probably help.