Acronis Fails to Write Image to External USB Drive

I uninstalled ATI Home 10 and installed ATI Home 11 a few weeks ago. I also purchased and installed a new Western Digital USB 2.0 External drive to catch backups.

Upon installation I immediately setup Backup Locations on my E: drive (internal SATA Seagate 500 GB drive) and K: drive (External WD USB 500 GB drive - Formatted to NTFS). I scheduled incremental backups with a maximum of 6 backups per location and a maximum of 250 GB space per backup location, with every third backup being a full backup. The backups to E: drive are proceeding fine - no problems at all. However ATI Home 11 will or can not write data to the K: drive (WD USB). Each attempt yields the same error messages in my log:

"Failed to write data to the archive file. A possible reason might be poor media quality..."

"Operation with partition "0-0" was terminated. |Details:[Write error 0x70004]"

Several other applications - including BackUp4All and Super Flexible File Synchronizer - are having no problem at all writing to - or reading from - this drive. Also, it passes the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic tests - both the Quick and the Extended tests - without any issues noted. A S.M.A.R.T. monitoring program has shown the temperature and all other S.M.A.R.T. attributes that it logs and all are completely normal. I cannot find even a hint of a bad sector on the drive.

Even so, I decided to wipe the drive and perform a low-level format to NTFS again and start all over - same result.

Finally I disconnected an older Maxtor One Touch external Firewire/USB drive from another PC and connected it to this PC via USB - same results: ATI Home 11 says it cannot write to this drive either, and gives me the same lines about "...possible poor media...". The Maxtor drive used to be connected to this PC while I had ATI Home 9 and 10 - and it had no issues with ATI backups being written to it - ever. Until it met ATI Home 11 apparently.

I am fairly well convinced that neither of these drives are of poor quality and that they are performing fine. The problem seems to be with Acronis TI Home 11. Which is why I was surprised to come here and see no other results like this posted.

Is anyone else seeing similar problems? And does anyone have an thoughts as to why ATI Home 11 fails to write to external drives?

Thank you.

Jim

 

You could try to disconnect any other USB device on your computer. This being done, you could then try to backup connecting your external HDD to each USB port in sequence. It's just an idea...

 

Hello all,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that Acronis True Image 11 Home uses stream data transferring method to save data to backup archive files, so if you create a backup on an external drive it is necessary for the product to keep the specified data transfer speed which can be limited by maximum USB bus transfer rate, otherwise backup creation process may be interrupted with error. It seems like your external USB drive can not keep the specified write speed on the same level while being filled.

J-Mac, in this case we recommend you to use the new feature of Acronis True Image 11 Home and manually decrease hard disk drive writing speed. Please run Acronis True Image 11 Home, open Tools -> Options... -> Default backup options -> Backup performance -> HDD writing speed and decrease writing speed to Minimum.

Then please check if the problem still persists. If not you can try increasing the speed of data transfer step-by-step by one scale division.

In case the issue is still not eliminated please submit a request for technical support. Provide the description of the problem and the link to this thread. We will investigate the issue and will do our best to provide you with a solution.

Please feel free to contact us again any time should you have any further questions.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Alexey Bogomolov

 

I'm running ATI v10 and have never been able to backup an entire drive to my WD MyBook 500GB external drive in Windows XP. I always get the "poor media quality" error when the backup is almost complete. I've run a check on my internal and external HDs using the Gibson Research tool and the seatools and all bad sectors have been corrected. I've also defragged and run chkdsk on both drives.

A few days ago I tried to backup the entire drive using the boot disk and it worked just fine. Unfortunately I don't have an answer as to why this works from the boot disk and not in Windows XP but I have the question posted to Acronis in another thread.

 

I use a WD MYBook 250. I had it first as issued on a Win98SE machine using Acronis 8.0 to automatically backup to it. Worked fine for a year till the machine went up in smoke.

Then I moved it to a new Vista Home Basic machine and reformatted it to NTFS. It has been working great with Acronis 11 Home for months now. It does a full backup of C: every day for a week, and then begins again overwriting the older backups. It does a full backup of D: once a week, and a manual Full Backup of the hidden partition for my system, which I will eventually eliminate, relying only on Acronis.

Both installations were trouble free. I doubt it's your drive unless it's faulty. BUT: WD does not like its drives plugged into either a hub or into front USB ports, and is pretty insistent about having only the provided cable attached. Plugged into anything but a top level back port, it may not be recognized at all, or not by some software. So, I am told.

Good luck

 

I am doing a trial of ATI server and I am having the exact same problem but I am writing to a US Robotics NAS with 4 SATA drives in a RAID 5 set. I have tried to throttle it down some but I have not gone to minimum yet. Strange why it does not just go as fast as it can and adjust where needed. I calculated getting 365MB/min +/- which seems slow for image to HD when backup to LTO can reach speeeds of 1000MB/min over the network easy.