Salient Soft

Previously this had been an issue as the PC would sleep during the validation of a Backup, so I manually switched to an Always On power plan.

With the current PC build I was using, the PC would hang and not shut down cleanly if it was put into sleep and woken whilst an eSATA drive was attached to the 2-port STARTECH card I was using. Providing the PC did not sleep, all was fine.

I therefore looked for a means of automatically switching to always on for Backup runs. Rather than switch back to the normal power plan automatically after the backup, I elected to leave Always On set and switch back to normal on every startup. This way, I would be sure that if I still had the eSATA drive connected after a backup, the pc would not sleep.

This Acronis forum post which refers to this instructional pdf detail a workaround to the problem, which involves coding a batch file to switch power plans, and calling it as a pre/post custom command in Acronis in the backup settings.

In addition, as I wanted to set the plan back to normal at boot time, I used the technique from this StackOverflow post which worked correctly. Originally I had tried using a scheduled task triggered at boot time, but it refused to run and did not give a reason why.

My registry settings file, batch files, and vbs script are listed below for reference. Note that the GUIDS correspond to the particular power plans, and are unique for each one and different for each pc – see the above pdf for details of how to list the power plans with their corresponding GUIDs.

This fixed the problem, but I remain unimpressed that Acronis does not handle this automatically or have a setting for it in a backup definition. You can tell it to prevent sleep for scheduled backup runs, but not for manually initiated ones.

SetPowerPlanNormal.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"SetPowerPlanNormal"="wscript.exe \"C:\\System Management\\RunInvisibleBatchFile.vbs\" \"C:\\System Management\\SetPowerPlanNormal.bat\""

RunInvisibleBatchFile.vbs

CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run """" & WScript.Arguments(0) & """", 0, False

SetPowerPlanNormal.bat

:: Change Power Plan to Normal.
::
@ECHO OFF
POWERCFG -SETACTIVE ccaec46d-cbf8-42af-9e8f-ab66182942f7
::
@EXIT

SetPowerPlanAlwaysOn.bat

:: Change Power Plan to AlwaysOn.
::
@ECHO OFF
POWERCFG -SETACTIVE 499ab33e-0735-4605-8ccc-98211478164b
::
@EXIT

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I tried using Acronis TIH 2010 to backup to 2 different removable drives, to rotate them. Initially I mounted each drive as R: when used, which requires changing the drive letter each time. As a consequence of this, I was also using a single TIH backup task and a single TIH validate task for both removable drives. However, when I came to do a separate validation of the backup on the 2nd drive, having already done the first, I received the error “The operation failed” with no other detailed information. This was strange, as the backup process had just done its own validation successfully. I suspected that Acronis was confused between the 2 backups, as both had the same name (as they were done on the same date during testing) and were on the same drive letter, even though they were different volumes. Acronis keeps an internal database of its backups as detailed here, and as the post indicates, it needs to keep track of the renaming/moving of backups. The confusion on this was compounded by this post concerning Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, which states that when using multiple usb drives as rotating backups, the same drive letter should always be used. However, this is clearly not correct in my scenario. In another test, I performed a second incremental backup on each removable drive, and Acronis asked me to browse for the correct full backup when doing the validation phase of the backup – it had clearly become confused.

I switched to using a different drive letter for each volume, R: and S:. As a consequence I also created separate backup and validate tasks for each volume, as each would point to a different drive letter – this also improved clarity as  a side effect – it separated the activiy/logs for each volume which gave a clear view of what had been done. Having done this, I did a full backup with each volume in turn of the same PC, and did an additional validation as well. All of these worked correctly. Crucially, in addition I re-did a validation of the first again at the end, having backed up and validated the second. This still worked correctly – Acronis was now able to track the backups correctly.

The other advantage of separate drive letters is that Windows will try to reuse the same letter for a volume as it used previously, meaning that mostly you will only need to set them once with Disk Manager (this can get messed up if you have additional removable drives in at the time you mount one of the backup ones, as Windows may have already re-used the ‘reserved’ drive letter, but mostly it works fine).

Although I did not test it, I suspect that another solution would be to uniquely label each backup file on each volume, perhaps by incorporating the volume name (e.g. “Backup1”, “Backup2”) as part of the file name. I suspect that this also would remove the ambiguity which was tripping up Acronis. In my case, I was happy to use the same folder and file naming convention on each backup volume, and just keep the drive letters different. You should use drive letters consistently in acronis – if you do not, it will be unable to find the backups it has in its database and will end up prompting for the location of backups when asked to run tasks.

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