Computer won't shut down after backup
Acronis 2014 Windows7 64-bit.
A scheduled backup that begins after hours overnight, completes, but when I arrive at the computer in the morning the power is still on. When I turn on the monitors and click on anything, THEN the computer shuts down. When I restart the computer and examine the log, the backup shows as valid and complete.
This makes the powerdown option useless. Is this a bug?
I believe MVP Enchantech has the answer but if you want a workaround, click on my signature link 1 below and review index item RR RA which is an alternate way to accomplish the shutdown.
Edited: corrected link RR to RA.
More likely a settings problem. Take a look at your power management options and see if you can determine anything wrong there.
Nothing that I can see here that should affect this. The displays turn off after 15 minutes, but the system never sleeps. I used to use another software package that turned off the system just fine at the completion of a backup.
Are you backing up to an external device? If so that device may be causing the problem. You can check properties in device manager for turn off options for such a device.
I'm backing up to a secondary internal drive so that's not an issue. It just did it AGAIN this morning. I turned on the monitors and started working and forgot to check on last night's backup. after working on some other stuff for a while, I got a popup prompt from Acronis that the backup wasn't complete. I launched Acronis, and sure enough..was immediately told that a shutdown would begin in 25 seconds...I overrode the shutdown..(since I had a bunch of other sofware still open) After aborting the shutdown, I checked the backup log, and sure enough, I had a valid backup from last night's cycle.
This appears to be a bug in the software. I don't think this is a power management issue.
I believe MVP Enchantech has the answer but if you want a workaround, click on my signature link 1 below and review index item RR which is an alternate way to accomplish the shutdown.
Hi Grover,
Thank you for your response. I’m assuming you meant index item RA not RR, but that is beside the point. I appreciate that many times there are workarounds that software programmers can offer to compensate for software design errors, but I’d like to see if this is truly a design error (bug) or an undocumented settings issue (feature) within the Acronis software.
My money is on the former, since the abysmal Acronis support structure burned through 3 weeks of my initial 30 day support on an initial error that made the software functionally useless while I went through a ping-pong match in email as Acronis’ non-English speaking, flow-chart-reading pawns fed me bad and duplicate information from an out-of-date knowledge base in feeble attempts to resolve what turned out to be a design bug inherent in the Acronis True Image 2014 software regarding an inability to read current driver information from my pointing device.
THEN after resolving that issue, and being provided a work around, I was able to finally use the software to structure a backup schedule that I’ve been using for several years with my previous software package, only to struggle for another week and a half with this shutdown issue with no help from the Acronis knowledge base.
NOW I’ve been told that the 30-day free chat/email tech support has expired so I’m relegated to dealing with other Acronis users for tech support, or pay Acronis a $20.00 single incident fee to resolve this issue.
Frankly I’m about ready to cut my losses, dump this software and find another solution. I’ve had two bugs unfold before I’ve even gotten the software fully operational and in the process, I’ve uncovered an Acronis company policy that has repeatedly refused to extend their support to compensate for the 3 wasted weeks at the beginning (due mostly to an anachronistic support structure)
I’ll keep your workaround in mind. However, I’d really like to know if this is a true bug, or if there is an obscure settings issue that is preventing the Acronis software from shutting down as it is being told to do with the settings I’ve indicated.
I won’t continue to support a company that intentionally streets buggy software and then relies on what amounts to extortion to extract further resources from its customers to fix problems that should have been corrected before bringing a product to market.
Software companies should take financial responsibility for their own errors. I could have billed a client of mine almost an hour of my time that it took me to compose and write this message.
Q: Why is Acronis so cavalier when dealing with individual customer’s time?
A: Because they don’t really care much about individual users of their products, and haven’t yet been placed in a situation that would have them financially understand the non-violent power of the “Social Media P.R. “Nuclear Option”” available to any customer and which can be implemented at any moment.
The only missing element is the desire on the part of any one customer to implement this option. Gone viral, this option could destroy a company, not because it is a lie, but because it is the truth.
Bruce,
So you are saying then that even though the machine had not shut down you did get a warning message that the backup was not complete, cancelled the impending shutdown, immediately went to the backup log and found a completed and I take it validated backup?
I take note of 2 things, one, you are running Win 7 X64 (known for having power scheme issues), and two, in your original post you comment that "in the morning the power is still on. When I turn on the monitors and click on anything, THEN the computer shuts down. When I restart the computer and examine the log, the backup shows as valid and complete."
Your comment indicates to me that you have another piece of hardware in your machine or possibly another software app running in the background that is keeping the machine from shutdown. It would be logical to assume that if I am correct here that whatever it is that prevents shutdown once activity on the machine is sensed in the morning this offending condition releases the hold it has on your power scheme and at that moment you get the message about impending shutdown. It would not be unusual for that process to take several minutes. Now having said that, I do find suspicious the fact that this TI warning states that backup is not complete yet you find that it is. This would indicate to me at least that something on your machine has signaled shutdown, that signal has been ignored because the backup has not completed, TI has run the backup to completion but the shutdown scheduled to be performed by TI fails because of the first failed shutdown attempt.
It has been my experience that power management issues are tough to figure out and often require hours, days, weeks to figure out. My first recommendation for you would be to make certain that all hardware and system drivers are up to date. This will require manually gathering driver version numbers and visiting manufacturer sites to see if everything is up to date. If you find anything at all out of date, install the updates. Next, have a look at all apps running in the background of your machine and check for updates that may be available to those as well. Additionally, run Windows update and make certain you check out any optional updates that may be available and update accordingly. Let the backup run again to see if that helps.
If this does not help or you find that all drivers, apps, and Windows are up to date then do some investigating on your hardware for settings that might be in conflict with your power scheme. Some that come to mind are network nic, hard drives, monitor settings, video adapter. Generally these should be set to allow disable or turn off after a given amount of inactivity. Having said that you may want to disable any power saving settings for these devices first, allow a scheduled backup to run and see what happens. If that succeeds then you can enable each one, one at a time to find out which one if any may be causing the issue.
Another problem that occurs with some frequency are bios settings for power. You should insure that ACPI 2.0 is enabled and other settings you can experiment with on or off to see if that may help and while you are there check for bios revision updates as well.
With any luck you will find your offending problem sooner rather than later but as my luck always has it, it always seem to be the last thing I try after exhausting everything else first. If all on this fails then you might me right about a bug!
There has been reports of the power setting configured for maximum performance has prevented normal behavior in the power options. Check if you a power configuration settimg such as Balanced power , etc and try that power setting.
Yes, the RA was the correct link (sorry about that). You may also find this pdf of interest.
http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/forum/2009/11/5940/keep_wi…
There have also been reports of user accidentally checking the option "run backups only when idle" which can delay things as the user is never really idle. This option is found inside the schedule"advanced settings."
GH8. How to view or set somewhat hidden advanced scheduled backup settings.
Had a similar problem with power off option after backup. However, in my case the backup was invoked directly and not through the scheduler. I posted a comment in this forum about my predicament but frankly after following the different solutions given, the results were... sometimes it worked and sometimes not.
Anyway, I've gotten rid of the problem by running TI via the Rescue Disk and here the power off option ALWAYS works. The additional benefits are that I'm sure that there are no open files that maybe would not be backed up and the whole backup/validate process runs more than twice as fast!
Maybe not an answer to you needs or requirements but hey, it works great for me.
Your comment indicates to me that you have another piece of hardware in your machine or possibly another software app running in the background that is keeping the machine from shutdown.
Not a factor. I shut down all applications at the end of the day.
Now having said that, I do find suspicious the fact that this TI warning states that backup is not complete yet you find that it is. This would indicate to me at least that something on your machine has signaled shutdown, that signal has been ignored because the backup has not completed, TI has run the backup to completion but the shutdown scheduled to be performed by TI fails because of the first failed shutdown attempt.
Sorry, I don’t follow. My system never has an auto-shutdown, nor hibernate engaged, (I'm well aware that windows has always had power management issues) so nothing else in my system could possible trigger a shutdown prior to TI’s command. Yes the disks spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity, and the monitors after 15 minutes, but since the TI backups are being completed (except for actually executing the shutdown sequence) it appears that there is a setting (or a bug) somewhere in TI that requires a manual confirmation of the shut down. I sit down in the AM and turn on the monitors and the indicator in the task bar tells me that shutdown will commence in 30 seconds. I can choose to confirm or abort.
It has been my experience that power management issues are tough to figure out and often require hours, days, weeks to figure out. My first recommendation for you would be to make certain that all hardware and system drivers are up to date.
My system is meticulously maintained and all drivers and the OS are updated on a regular basis.
Having said that you may want to disable any power saving settings for these devices first, allow a scheduled backup to run and see what happens. If that succeeds then you can enable each one, one at a time to find out which one if any may be causing the issue.
Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Give the tremendous amount of productive time that has had to be taken away from my business already just getting to this point while trying to engage tech support at Acronis, I’ll likely dump the product. I’d rather cut my losses and find a competing product that actually works out of the box.
I've used Genie Backup Manager for years, and never once had a problem with the system automatically shutting down at the end of the backups. GBM's only trouble is that they do not have the disk cloning capabilities that TI has. I bought TI thinking that the transition would be seamless and easy.
NOTHING could be further from the truth. It took Acronis 3 weeks to finally admit to me that TI 2014 won't work with one of my Wacom pointing devices (they admitted the bug). That finally got sorted out with a workaround, but now I'm faced with this power issue that they won't even support without forking over more cash, since my 30 days of support got burned through already just as I was diagnosing this new power issue.
Trust is earned. At this point I not sure that I trust Acronis at all.
I understand your frustration, let me ask, what is the power setting you currently have set on your machine? I think my using the word shutdown here was not a good choice, should probably have said sleep or hibernate, you indicate that hibernate is not active so i assume your machine enters a sleep mode then, would this be correct? Do you know what level of sleep mode your machine is set to enter, S2, S3,? One of the problems that Win 7 has with sleep functions is a lack of a sleep timeout control. This prevents the sleep function from occurring as it should in varying degrees from no sleep to works sometimes sometimes not. On the off chance you might care to try to add this functionality to your machine I am providing a link that will help you do so.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/246364-power-options-add-system-un…
This may not solve your issue but it certainly won't make it any worse.
With all due respect, Enchantech, after making an honest attempt to respond to your offerings, I've lost all interest in this discussion. it takes WAY too much effort to create an edited response in this forum, and I believe that's how the people that run this place want it to be.
Compounding the anachronistic product support policies on top of the idea that the publishers are intentionally inhibiting the nature of this forum so that it won't let an individual to EASILY quote/edit/respond to a response from another user here without possessing EXTREME net capabilities puts me over the edge.