True Image 2009 - Automatic backup to USB HDD when plugged in?

Hi,

I bought True Image 2009 mainly because it says on the product page that it automatically starts the backup process when the target drive is available. So I scheduled an incremental backup job for every Saturday, 3pm to my external USB HDD. With the HDD unplugged the job tried to start at Sat, 3pm but I got an error that the target drive couldn´t be found. So far so good, but when I plugged in the external HDD nothing happened. The the backup didn´t start. Do I have to wait for a certain time or does it only work with USB flash drives? Maybe I´m missing something...

Thanks in advance,
Alex

 

The external drive has to be plugged in and running before TI is either opened or the scheduler starts the imaging program.

It should however, attempt to image to the default backup location, which is a folder called images in your My documents folder unless you have altered that.

If that hasn't happened then check that the default location isn't pointing to the SZ.

Colin

 

And make sure that the external HD receives the the same Drive letter as what was instructed in the backup task.

 

Thanks for you help. So if I understand you correctly, this advertised feature doesn´t really work?

Or maybe I just misunderstood that.

@bodgy: What does "SZ" mean?

 

Well it does, but not as a hot pluggable device. What they meant to say is, that if a drive is plugged in before TI starts, then it will image to that drive, but if the drive is unavailable when TI starts it will then make the image elsewhere.

Secure Zone.


Colin

 

I guess I have to go back to manual backups then. In TI 2009 is there at least finally an easy way to create a shortcut to a backup task?

 

If I schedule a backup for an external hard drive, and the drive is not plugged in, why would TI then go ahead and back it up to my internal drive? That makes no sense.

Can anyone confirm that this really happens? I know that if you edit a task and the external hard drive is unplugged, the backup location will be changed to a location on your internal drive. However, if TI changes the backup location on the fly, I'd say that this is a bug.

 

That is the whole idea of the new backup location mechanism, you can of course repoint it to another internal drive. I assume the idea was that at least you'd still have an image made if the external drive was not online when a task began. Don't forget there is now the new one click backup option, where it is probably better that an image is made than one missed.

Yes I can! It worked during beta testing and works now, in fact it works a little too well, if you search some posts from a month or two ago, I reported a problem where if the task started automatically I was running out of internal drive space as it was imaging to the backup image folder in my documents, but if started manually it was imaging correctly to the external drive (this was using the previous build).

Not sure I follow you here, to me, on the fly means as it is imaging and I've never seen it do that, but if by on the fly you mean TI decides where the image is going to be placed, then given the criteria mentioned this is exactly what it does and was designed to do.

In essence it is the Echo Enterprise - backup location system pared right back for home user application.

Colin