not recognizing the external hard drive
I just purchased the True Image Home 2016 for 3 computers and installed it on a new computer and went to create a backup but the program is not recognizing that I have plugged in the external hard drive. I have tried unplugging it and then plugging it in again and I can't get past the screen to plug in an external device.
I have never had this problem in the past with other versions of True Image and I have checked and the drive is recognized in the device manager as well as my pc. I have even rebooted the pc and tried again but it will not recognize the external hard drive.
And suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Lisa, is your USB drive showing up in Windows and does it have a drive letter? If so, make sure it is plugged in BEFORE you launch Acronis and attempt to setup a backup. Acronis may not pick it up if the applicatoin was launched first and then the drive is attached later.
Also, when selecting it as a backup destination, if the drive does not have sufficient space to store the backup, it will not be usable. This can occur if you only attend to backup one drive, but have selected "entire pc" instead of "disks and paritions". "disks and paritions" will allow you so select specific disks to backup. "entire pc" will backup multiple drives as attached to the PC at any given time. I would recommend not using "entire pc" because of this and often confuses people when their backup suddenly grows or stops running because they are backing up unintended disks which go over the available size of their backup drive.
I did try plugging the external hard drive in first and then starting the Acronis True Image program as well as plugging it in after I have already started the program. Both ways simply were not working. The drive does show up in windows and does have a drive letter as well. It wouldn't work when I also tried using a different external hard drive - which is why I was going nuts.
Anyway, I finally decided to drive something else just about an hour ago. I had purchased the software for 3 computers / pc's and email confirmation gave me a link with the software to download. Which is what I did yesterday and clicked to install if from that. So I uninstalled the program and then went to my account and downloaded the software again using that link and installed it. I just finished that, rebooted the computer (just in case) and then clicked on the program and this time it is working. I am guessing that the download link in that confirmation email was the problem. Thanks so very much for all the help and suggestions. I do truly appreciate it.
Glad to try and help.
Unfortunately, backup tasks are tied to a specific hard drive when configured. Simply swapping hard drives (even if they have the same letter in Windows) will not work as the destination disk will have a different hardware ID than what the backup was originally configured for. Additionally, sometimes Windows reassigns a drive letter to external disks, if they are plugged in when teh original drive letter is already in use.
Example: Main Drive is C: and your backup drive is D: and you configure backups to this D: drive. You remove the current D: drive and plug in a USB flash drive which becomes D:. While it is assigned D:, you plug in the original backup external Drive and Windows makes it the E: Drive. It will now remain the E: drive even when the USB flash is removed. As a result, I'd recommend that you manually assign your external hard drive a letter further down the line so this is less likely to occur. After that, then configure a new backup task to that drive, using that letter and all should be well as long as the drive is connected and keeps that drive letter.
If you later decide you want to use a different backup drive, you need to create a new backup task and configure it for that specific drive.
Has this been resolved? Since having multiple drives in a backup rotation is good practice, only allowing one specific drive per backup doesn't seem like a good plan.
