TI 10 hangs 98% completed

Recently purchased V10 as Acronis download. While I didn't find it as intuitive as I was hoping I did figure it out--I bought it for it's size,# of backups, and time rules. So set up backup location and limited the full and differential images only by size. Did some testing. It seems to work until the size rule is exceeded. At that point the log recognizes the fact it's exceeded the size and needs to delete an old set to make room due to the limit of the size of the backup location. At that point it shows less than one minute to go and 98% complete---then it hangs and hangs the external drive---only way to release it is with Ctl/alt/delete and shut down the computer.

I have a two yr old Dell with XP home and am backing up a C drive about 44gig to an external Seagate 300gig firewire drive. Incidentally I've also tried a 300gig Maxtor drive USB--with two attempts I got the dreaded 'blue screen of death'---no idea why.

I've written to Acronis support. They had me install the snapAPI MSI file and new snapapi.dll's. None of that changed anything. I've also reinstalled the program and cleaned out the registry with CCleaner as was suggest by a forum member. I've written back to Acronis with the poor results--still waiting to hear further suggestions.

The problem is very repeatable--just takes hours of testing to fill the backup location size just to see that when the rule is exceeded it hangs when it tries to delete the older backups to make room for the new one. At least that's what I see in the log.

I'm surprised I haven't seen this exact problem in this forum. Maybe I'm the only one or others havent tested it and assume it's working. The backups look fine--it just can't enforce the size rule and that's exactly why I bought it in the first place.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Speedster

 

Cleaning the registry and uninstalling is sometimes not enough. For a full scrub, you should, after uninstalling, delete any Acronis directories (and associated subdirectories) under \Program Files\.

That might be all you need to do.

sh

 

I'm sorry I should have been more detailed---I not only deleted any pertinent registry entries but also the directories that remained including the scripts. It didn't help, so I'm thinking that my problem is not an install issue--no install errors etc. There is something that is interfering with TI 10 from deleting old backups to make room in the backup location. At least that's what I can see from the log which is pretty detailed

 

Saw a post that indicated that when doing the triple scrub it's helpful to look at device manager and delete the Acronis entry. Did that too last night and reinstalled. Same problem, program freezes when 98% complete.

I wrote to Customer support sometime ago=-no response.

I had the rules set to limit size to 50gig for the Backup location. Told the task to do one full and 2 differential bkups. It's backing up about 40gig and with normal compression that results in bkup file size of about 34gig. So it should have made one full, and two differential backups and then enforced the rule and deleted the first set---instead it froze up when 98% complete on the second full bakup.

I saw a post that says you need to have the the location sized large enough to have room for the second full image as it creates it before it deletes the first one. Well if I increased the location size to 80 or so then it wouldn't enforce the rule because there would be enough room for the second full image! So that doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe I need to forget setting a size rule and try setting a rule for the number of backups to allow??

This is taking hours and hours of time. The user guide is very poorly written and incomplete. I don't find the software intuitive at all. I'm sorry I bought this software and customer support has been less than helpful. I've sent them logs with no response.


- Unnecessary comment removed - Menorcaman

 

Hello speedster,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

If I understood you correctly, the backup location is located on the external drive. Could you please try to create a new backup location on the internal hard drive and then see if the issue persists. You could use file-based backup approach in order to speed up the process, namely, set "Location size quotas" to 10 MB, for example, and back up several files and folder of that size to the backup location.

It would also be helpful if you let me know your Acronis request # which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? I will find out how the investigation of your issue is going.

Could you please describe this issue in more details? What exactly did you try to perform that leads you to the error? Please also perform the action described in this previous post of mine to enable Windows mini-dumps that will allow us to investigate the problem thoroughly and to provide you with a possible solution. Then send the collected files to Acronis Support Team as a reply to their last response. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Thank you for the reply Aleksandr. Yes some time ago Support suggested I do a backup on my C drive which I did. The result was somewhat different than when backing onto external firewire drive. I had the rule set in tasks to make one full and two differential (no size or time limits were set in the backup location--just number of backups to be allowed). The program ignored the rule and made three full images. This was reported to support on ticket #864971

Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

I think you will find that TI is doing its darndest to protect your original backup. When the location is sized so that it cannot fit in two complete backups it will not delete the first one because if it did you could be left with no backup at all.
I believe the rule is that the first backup is not deleted till the second one has been written.
As I do not use your backup location method I cannot be absolutely sure of this but it makes sense logically.

Xpilot

 

I subsequently gave up on a 'size' rule for the backup location. Started using the number of backups allowed. And I get the same result---when the rule is exceeded the program hangs up at 98% complete and according to the log it hangs when it tries to enforce the rule violation by deleting the oldest back up. So I have the same problem no matter what type of rule I try to get the program to enforce.

 

When doing some prior testing on this, using just relatively small sets of data, about 1GB, I noticed some very significant "hang" times when TI 10 is consolidating backups to stay within the chosen parameters. In my case it eventually finished the job and all was well. The process did create a temporary file in the backup location with a long file name, the temporary file vanished when the consolidation was complete.

Next time you get the 98% hang, you might look in Explorer at your backup location and see if you have an extra file processing, if so it might eventually complete. Just speculating here.

 

Are your backups password protected. Someone mentioned that there's an issue with automatically deleting image files when the files are password protected.

sh

 

Thanks for the replys. No my backups are not password protected. When I say it does hang at 98% complete---the program also is saying it has less than one minute to complete. I have left it in this state for various times ranging from 15min to 30min and it's still hung---I would think that should be plenty time for it to consolidate or to delete old backups to enforce the rule.

CatFan yes occasionally I have checked the explorer directory and looked at the backup location. And sometimes yes there is a file there with a very long name and it's a large one. Probably the new backup that it made. But I can't see how it could take up to over 30min to complete the task when it only took 45 min or so to make the new full image. That seems awfully excessive to me and unacceptable even if it were to complete after 30min.

Also when it hangs, my external drive is hung in some rather noisy mode. Hitting cancel does nothing. I have to ctl/alt/delete out of TI and then shut down the computer to get the external drive to silence and return to normal. I have no idea why. TI just doesn't have an ability to finish the process when it's required to enforce the rule. It has never done it right for me. I have completely reinstalled after full wipe suggested in this forum and nothing seems to help.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

Speedster,
Emphasizing that I'm still just guessing, I set up a trial backup that would require a 2GB incremental to merge with another 2GB incremental in order to stay within the backups allowed limit. The last incremental took about 3 minutes to get almost done, at which point the temp file with the long name showed up, then the progress bar just sat there for almost 8 minutes more while the merging was taking place, then the task showed completed, at which time the temp file and the last incremental dropped from explorer and the larger, merged incremental was left. Extrapolating from this with your file sizes and it just might be possible the merging is taking that long, thus the noise from your external. No disagreement from me that the process time seems extremely long. It would be helpful if Acronis could provide some information on the merge/consolidation process.

I have found that TI is very stubborn about stopping a task that I have tried to cancel, especially the merge process mentioned above. This is a good feature in my opinion, as it is trying to complete the job and not lose data.

Very much not a expert, CatFan

 

Thanks for trying CatFan. I have been receiving suggestions from Acronis support and have sent them many screen shots and logs. The only thing that flies in the face of the delete taking over 30min is that if that was the case I would think Acronis support would tell me that is normal behavior! And they haven't said that even though I have told them that it hangs at 98% and 30sec left to go. Gosh if it can do a full image backup of my C drive in 45min you'd think it would consolidate differentlials in less than 30min.

I'm hesitant to let it run for hours as the external drive is really making a lot of noise and the activity light is flickering constantly---which can't be good for the drive.

I've pretty much given up hope of a solution and am abandoning the software until either support resolves this with me or I see a new build becomes available that I can try. There are many posts that I've seen that deal with backup rules; some caused by poor instructions in the manual and people not knowing how to set up backup locations etc; but there are many posts that indicate many are doing it correctly and the software isn't working correctly, many times people report the rules are ignored; as you know in my case TI realizes it's exceeded the rules and just can't consolidate correctly, which for me makes the software suspect and useless.

I'm at a loss as where to go from here.

 

Can't say as I blame you, speedster. If you do get some helpful guidance from Acronis via email instead of this forum, you might go ahead and post what they say here.

Yes, by definition, a backup program you can't trust is useless. I trust TI 10 a great deal, but my backups are only 8GB or so, and run without problems. If I had your situation, I would be where you're at, also.

 

It does seem to me that consolidation - which presumably takes place all on one drive - could take a lot longer than backup. Particularly with an external drive, which is probably slower than the internal drive. I assume you don't have enough room on the internal drive to test this?

I would not put a lot of faith in its estimate of 98% done with 30 seconds to go. Progress bars in MOST programs are notoriously inaccurate.

One thing to try, so you can see what is going on: there is a utility called filemon - originally written by sysinternals.com, now owned by Microsoft - that will show you all file activty. You can perhaps see what files TI is beating up on. Here's a link to the Microsoft web page: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx.

You might also gather some stats on the performance of your external hard drive, and compare it to your internal drive. And to someone elses (like mine). There is a pretty good one here - http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/be_hdd.html - download the one called Disk Speed, run it, and see what you get. My C: drive had an overall score of 7538, my Seagate external USB drive has an overall score of 2181. My Iomega USB drive has a speed of 1377. These numbers are only meaningful in the context of this speed test program, but they should show you relative performance of your hard drives. We might actually want to look at random read and access time numbers more specifically - consolidation probably requires a lot of random activity.

Let me know if I can help with any of this.

Dan

One last point - is your external hard drive making A LOT OF NOISE? Could it have some hardware errors and be going through recalibration of some kind?

 

Thanks Dan---I'll try some of your suggestions---I also use external Seagate 300gig but running firewire.

Acronis support had me duplicate the problem on my C drive---same issue---I agree the Seagate would be considerably slower---but it hung when backing the C drive to a backup location on the C drive

I just received message from support---they want me to uninstall Symantec software and duplicate the problem. I'm hoping I can just temporarily disable it---Norton stuff can be a pain when you want to remove and reinstall---probably will take me hours not to mention my antivirus just expired.

I'll post again if I find a solution

Thanks