Acronis 2014 prevents sleep after backup

The following isn't a direct Acronis solution to your issue but here's some ideas that you can check and a couple of alternate options that should work to put your PC back into Sleep mode after your Acronis backup job completes.

I'm running Win 7x64 Home Premium OS but this info should apply to Win 8.1.

- You might want to check your Sleep Timeout setting in Control Panel. In Win 7,

Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Power Options/Change when the computer sleeps/Changed advanced power settings

In the Advanced Settings Power Options dialog box (attached image to this post), expand the "sleep" box and check the settings that are indicated in the attached image file.

The unattended Sleep Timeout default setting in Windows Vista and 7 and, I believe in 8[.1] as well, is 120 seconds.

I have mine set to 300 minutes to prevent the default return-to-sleep Windows action since I'm running unattended overnight AV and Malwarebytes scans after my overnight Acronis backup job completes. My AV (Norton 360) has a "put PC to sleep after scan completes) so I'm using that to return my PC to sleep.

The Registry location for the Sleep Timeout setting is included in a screencap attachment in this post. I edited the dword key to decimal value 18000 seconds.

The Registry location/path is

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0\DefaultPowerSchemeValues

Registry Key Power Plan

381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e Balanced
8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c High performance
a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a Power saver

Regarding putting the PC to sleep after an unattended backup or other batch job completes, there are several ways to accomplish this.

I'm using a script that puts my PC back to sleep after my unattended Acronis backup job completes. My backup runs at 12pm. At 12:05pm, my Sleep script launches with Windows Task Scheduler.

I'm using "Autohotkey" to run scripts. It's a hotkey/script freeware download tool.

The Sleep command in Autohotkey is
DllCall("PowrProf\SetSuspendState", "int", 0, "int", 0, "int", 0)

Another way to run a batch Sleep command is to use one of the Sysinternals downloads, called "PSshutdown", in a script. Download link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897541

The Suspend (Sleep) command would be

psshutdown -d -t

The "t" argument can be used as a countdown time before the PC calls the Suspend action. The default countdown time is 20 seconds.

You can also use the Windows Suspend command within a CMD script but if my memory's right, you have to disable "hibernation" in a CMD batch. It also requires running the batch in elevated mode (run as Admin).

Within Acronis, I think you can run a "post-command" batch/file. Included is a screencap of my Acronis Backup/File backup options/Advanced tab.

I think I tried this a couple of years ago and it worked but I prefer using Windows Task Scheduler to run my Sleep batch script.

Hi, Thanks for the in depth reply Scoop I will run through your suggestions as soon as I can.

Just as an update though, I decided to abandon TI's task scheduler and rely on windows instead, I created a task to wake the computer and run a small program called "mouse jiggler" which prevents the computer from sleeping by simulating mouse movement. Task scheduler is set to terminate the program after 5 hours (although I've since set TI run a batch file to kill the process early).

The computer woke, TI ran its backup successfully, Mouse Jiggler terminated but still the computer failed to sleep (my sleep timer is set to send the system to sleep after 20 mins inactivity).

It seems this isn't purely related to TI, it just seems that when windows wakes from a sleep timer it never goes back to sleep again unless done manually, although any time it wakes again it will failed to sleep based on the sleep timer until the PC is restarted. Looking for devices sending power requests always shows nothing and energy reports also give no indication.

I used event viewer to lookup events relating to sleep and wake and it looks fine until I get to this morning where the an information event showing it woke at 00:58:45 GMT but then doesn't appear to have tried to get back to sleep again...

Any suggestions on what else I could look into as to what would prevent windows own sleep timer from working after a wake timer event?

Thanks for the assistance so far.

Simon,

You're welcome. Hope you can resolve the Sleep issue. Windows Sleep issues are numerous and can be difficult to resolve. That's why I decided to go with a Sleep task method. I recall in past years where my Desktop PC would intermittently stay awake when depending on the Control Panel Sleep timeout setting. I sort of gave up and went with my current post-Acronis backup job setup. It's been running good for about 3 years.

I had a similar issue with my Laptop a couple of years ago and the problem was related to my Win 7 Homegroup network. The Laptop was receiving some kind of a "handshake/ping" signal from the Desktop PC via the Homegroup LAN connection which was preventing the Laptop PC Sleep so I used the -requestsoverride option to remove that issue.

Since you've already tried the -requests option and it's not reporting any results, may be more difficult for you to identify the issue.

I'd try periodically checking that though (requests) since it may return the information needed if checked often.

You can create and schedule a temporary batch job that can periodically run the -requests option and output the results to a file. That way you can check to see if Powercfg is reporting something intermittent.

Something like this (*.bat script contents)

powercfg -requests >> c:\Users\your_pc_name\Desktop\requests.txt
exit

The double ">>" output parameter will append to the originally-created "requests.txt" file so you can check the contents of multiple queries daily or whenever your Task Scheduler runs the batch job.

Thanks for the help once again, I will definitely try the batch script and see if anything comes from that, hopefully i'll eventually find whats preventing sleep.

Thanks,

Simon.

If the computer will sleep before the backup, this may be of interest.

9. Grover's How to prevent Win7 computers from going to sleep during backups - PDF download
     For those having trouble with shutdowns or validations, this is a practical workaround.

Grover,

Thanks for that link. Wow, a great article :) I snagged that one for my PC Info folder.

I'm having a similar issue. Was there one particular thing that helped?