How to schedule ATI in Vista Ultimate and WAKE your machine

Yep, they definitely worked fine then, and this is a completely clean installation. The only difference is that this time I'm using Acronis Secure Zone whereas previously I used a regular partition for image storage. Maybe that's the problem?

...or perhaps it's just luck.

I really must apologise for sounding so negative. I'm more disappointed than anything.

 

Weird. Perhaps that was the missing link to getting differentials with the Task Sched. I and others asked about this earlier on this very page, and no one could come up with an answer. I use the Secure Zone for image backups, and it may be this that breaks the ability to create differential backups. You might want to test this, as you may get your differential backups back.

 

I found a workaround for it. It's very kludgy, but it works.

To summarise,
- I now use the regular Acronis scheduler to perform the backup.
- 1 minute before this backup begins I've set an event in Task Scheduler to wake the computer and use Stayawake to call Delayexec which would run for 2 hours (this time doesn't matter).
- I have a batch file that is executed after the backup (set in ATI) which uses pskill to end delayexec which in turn allows Stayawake to exit and the computer to subsequently sleep.

My batch files are:
Stayawake.cmd - this is what is called to wake the PC, 1 minute before the Acronis task

Code:

Stayawake.exe /cmd delayexec.cmd

delayexec.cmd - this calls Delayexec and gets it to launch another command prompt window (donothing.cmd) after 2 hours (but it will be ended way before that time by another batch file)

Code:

cd\progra~1\utilit~1\
delayexec.exe c:\programdata\acronis\trueimagehome\donothing.cmd 7200 7200
exit

KillStayawake.cmd - this is set in the Acronis backup task as a process to run after backup

Code:

c:\progra~1\utilities\pskill.exe delayexec.exe

Everything now works as expected. Since it runs overnight it doesn't matter about the 3 command prompt windows that appear.