TI 2009 is not date bullet proof

Granted this is not an every day occurance, but I was trying out a utility's boot CD (not an Acronis product), which has the gall to change the BIOS time and date without warning.

When I rebooted back into Windows, the time and date were actually 9 hours in advance (so 5pm 31/10/2008 here, and the BIOS was now 2am 1/11/2008 ), this confused the TI scheduler, which tried to run a task with the following results.

It failed with an error message that the path and disks could not be found, and updated the logs and tasks to tomorrows date.

Now the interesting thing is, I do not have the run if missed option enabled on any of my tasks, as it causes a major problem in my view if an image is restored and one forgets to detach the external image drive on reboot - bung go all your nice images. So why would the scheduler think it ought to run because at boot time the date was out of wack?

It's taken me a little while to eradicate the all the TI files that seem to track the date, so it'll be interesting to see if it runs the schedule at 7:13pm tonight as it is supposed to.

Colin

OH Yes and Acronis, I still have had no acknowledgement of my two ticket requests.

 

Well I've had to run the task manually, TI's calendar reports the image as not done, and the scheduled tasks state it was done tomorrow.

What is it they say? Today was Tomorrow Yesterday!

 

Because it (ATI) is not to know that some vandalware has fiddled your System time in the BIOS, and therefore caused even the OS itself to 'think' it's now 9 hours into the future. Remember that Windows operates off the BIOS date_time.

Software and PCs don't have human intuition. (thankfully!) The former have no concept (or care) of time at all, and simply perform exactly as instructed.

So if it's as you describe ATI is only effectively doing precisely what it was told - to the best of it's available knowledge 'at that time'.

AfaIcs, the only way to take insurance against such possibilities would be to run an Online sys-time synchronizer, automatically before Acronis is allowed to run any event.
That would depend on the PC being Internet connected of course.

Sorry to hear about your mess and hope you can successfully repair and correct the problem asap.

--
Ltuae

Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately it kills all its students.

 

My point being, that the task, shouldn't have run at all, even if the scheduler was all out of wack, as none of my tasks are supposed to run if they are missed.

Now whether the next weird event is down tothe scheduler I don't know and don't intend to find out on my production PC. But once I booted after midnight or the first time on the actual 1 November, Windows booted into the ALL USERS profile using the same credentials as my actual correct login profile. At login TI again tried to run, and paused with a no path\drive found error message.

Rebooting the PC a second time, has brought up the correct desktop profile, software licence numbers etc. TI sent two emails telling me that it had completed the imaging. Again, imaging is not supposed to take place until 7pm this evening.

My conclusion is, it is possible that the scheduler program is more tightly linked to system or kernel parts of XP then previously thought. This behaviour might help someone suss out, why they have scheduled task problems or TI seemingly causes strangeness on their system.

Tonight at scheduled time will be interesting as TI says it has already run.

Colin

 

I understand now. Sorry to have obviously misinterpreted your description, I read it as being a successive b/u was performed out of the time sync, where it was in fact one done within the 9hrs duration, that shouldn't have.

Interesting. That User Acct issue you have sounds ominous.
The v12 scheduler problems are not inherent to XP I can assure you, running Vista 32 bit here. I don't think it's too integrated with the OS, and if anything probably not enough as it should be to be adequately Redmondware specs compliant.
Acronis are a heavily Loonix based~reliant company (suspect they use open-sauce libs and compilers too), and I reckon their products, and us end-users, pay heavily for that 'platform crossing experience'.

Fwiw: Since you raised this discussion I've did some experimenting setting up multiple ATI2009 scheduled tasks by moving my system date-time forward and back, then testing them -- and have found an almost opposite problem to yours.
ATI is missing the 2nd and 3rd (days) tasks completely, even when the PC is up and running (idling) over the duration it misses the due task, also, even if the Run If Missed is enabled and PC restarted it still 'forgets' it.
The tasks, that seem all setup correct and should work, get completely ignored. Have even recreated them, still can't get to work.

Can only conclude that the TI2009 scheduler is drastically broke. But how and where is anybody's guess? Most times it works (for me, especially when only single, run-of-the-mill simple tasks). At minimum it's proven to be inflexible and poorly reliable in many of the variable types of task duties I've set and tested it on over the past couple of weeks.

Hope Acronis are willing to rework it. Apparently they gave it a big rehash for this version 12, and looks like the gremlins really settled in then.

Please post back your results of tonights run. Will it or won't it?

--
Ltuae

 

Well, TI did run the task that was scheduled, just didn't image to the correct destination.

The backup location is clearly showing as K:\Fdrivefull (my external drive) and yet has imaged to my C: drive My Backups folder.

This is something I've now tried TWICE to raise a ticket for, and Acronis have yet to even send me an auto support ticket number.

Further information, which I missed out in my original post, is that, the task that the scheduler attempted to run, actually isn't scheduled to run on a Saturday, so not only should it not have run due to the time and date, but it was on a day it wasn't tasked to run.

And as for imaging to the duplicate secondary location, that has yet to work full stop!

I'm starting to get a tad annoyed!

Colin