True Image 2020 -Backup option settings loss

Barry, welcome to these public User Forums.

I haven't seen the same issue with notifications settings being lost and not read any topics in the forums from other users with the same issue?

Please ensure that you have the latest build of ATI 2020 installed, i.e. 21400 for Windows.

Barry, after seeing some other users posting topics about similar issues, I did a check on my own ATI 2020 Backup tasks and found that my own Notifications settings were 'lost' / reset to default (none) on 22/10/2019.

I was able to see this because of having a daily differential backup of my OS drive and recovered the script .tib.tis file for the task from the 21/10 where the email details were shown, then the backup for 22/10 onwards showed no email details!

I have also see 2 users with ATI 2018 reporting a loss of settings including notifications plus a ATI 2019 user who lost customised backup names at the same period.

I don't know why this should be unless Acronis have pushed some change out to logged in users but if so, it is news to me that this is even possible!#@!

For reference:

ATI 2018 topic: Options reset to initital settings

ATI 2019 topic: Customised filenames have reverted to default

Feedback submitted to Acronis using the tool in the app GUI to complain of this reset of all settings.  Just had to reconfigure all my own backup tasks to put back my automatic cleanup and notifications settings which had been lost, along with retention settings for cloud tasks!

Another user reporting same issue for ATI 2019.

(Bug) E-mail Notification turned off both fort application and online dashboard : http://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2019-forum/bug-e-mail-notification-turned-both-fort-application-and-online-dashboard

(topic awaiting moderation).

I'm going to toss out a theory to see what may come of it.

The problem has suddenly occurred at the same time on many systems running different versions of ATI. I don't think anything has changed within ATI, so I tend to lean towards something in the Windows runtime environments.

All the failures relate to XML files. Could it be that there is some minor syntactic infraction in the files that has always been ignored but now is not so that certain information in the XML files is no longer being detected when the file is read, thus in rewriting the file it's gone. Or conversely, a problem with the runtime environment itself.

Bruno, it seems very strange if this was down to something in Windows related to XML files - one change that I noticed was that the order of some file exclusions were changed  for my backup tasks so that these are now at the bottom of the list instead of previously being at the top??

<file_mask pattern="hiberfil.sys" />
<file_mask pattern="pagefile.sys" />
<file_mask pattern="swapfile.sys" />

It would be a strange bug that consistently altered these file_mask pattern items plus just removed email details from the same XML file..!!

One further comment: these changes happened to backup tasks that have not been run recently, some not for weeks, as well as those that are scheduled daily.  Also AAP is active to prevent changes to ATI files by non Acronis actors on the system.

Steve, are you able to recover the older script files from before the change to compare with the current ones?

As for tasks that have not been run recently... how did you determine that the changes happened, and when did they happen. Perhaps you looked at the options in ATI which caused the older XML file to be read and that is when the data was lost. Are you able to restore the script for one of those to the older version, and then inspect the script before looking at it in ATI, then while the options are being edited (without changing notification setting, but changing something else) and once more after saving the backup task in ATI.

Bruno, I have a daily differential backup of my OS drive which I recovered the .tib.tis files from over several different days which then identified that the scripts for 21/10 were correct as expected, but those for 22/10 had lost my changed settings including email details, automatic cleanup etc.

I have now changed all my backup tasks using the ATI GUI Options to get things back to how I want them and each one I opened the options for had already lost these settings - I had only checked the .tib.tis files for these tasks previously, not touched the tasks in the GUI.

I can see users coming to the forums to complain that their backup drives are filling up / become full because all automatic cleanup options have been reset and turned off, plus no notifications being sent to tell them what is happening or why!

Steve Smith wrote:

... and each one I opened the options for had already lost these settings...

 Were the settings known to be lost before you opened them in ATI?

EDIT: I'm just trying to nail down exactly when the data was lost in the script.

Lost after the backup on 21/10 as shown in the backup of 22/10, not noticed until today 24/10.

I have the same issue with ATI 2019. My backups worked as normal on 21/10/19. The next backup was due to run today (24/10/19) but didn't receive an email around the time I expected the backup to finish. When I looked at the backup it was set to "no schedule" and therefore didn't run. All my other Full backups were set to Incremental and all my notification settings had been deleted. I checked the folder where the scripts are stored and could see they had a modified date of 22/10/19, however I hadn't modified them at all.

I will feed this back to Acronis. In the meantime I have reverted the backup options to what they were previously.

BrunoC wrote:

All the failures relate to XML files. Could it be that there is some minor syntactic infraction in the files that has always been ignored but now is not so that certain information in the XML files is no longer being detected when the file is read, thus in rewriting the file it's gone. Or conversely, a problem with the runtime environment itself.

Is there a Windows-provided XML parsing routine that programs such as ATI invoke? If not, I don't think there could be much outside of ATI (or manual editing) that could make the changes.

Patrick O'Keefe wrote:

Is there a Windows-provided XML parsing routine that programs such as ATI invoke? If not, I don't think there could be much outside of ATI (or manual editing) that could make the changes.

While I don't know exactly under which application model the ATI application is built, I do know that a lot of the execution of such programs uses Windows runtime environments, be it .NET Framework, .NET Core, WPF, etc. Here, for example, is the XML Document Object Model  as part of .NET. Individual applications use these libraries for such basic functions as reading and writing XML documents. I would be about 99.9999% sure that ATI does not itself  textually parse the XML files itself but relies on the libraries. If you look at the Windows Update history, you wlll see periodic updates of the .NET framework.

The preponderance of similar errors across various versions of the application leads me to be highly suspicious of a change in the runtime libraries used by the applications. A lot of times these kind of issues happen when applications do not follow the rules quite right but thing work until something hardens the enforcement.

That is why I am trying to determine exactly when a script file went from being good to being bad. I cannot imagine these files are all sitting on the disk being changed through some mysterious gremlin. A more likely scenario is that ATI, using a library, is no longer reading the XML correctly. And if it is read in wrong, then writing it back out (when a backup is run or when a backup task is modified) would likely change the disk version of the script file.

For someone who had this happen, it would be interesting to see if there were any updates to the runtimes just prior to seeing the error. Since I didn't have the issue, I can't really test it. It would also be worth getting one of the prior scripts and trying to run it through the libraries to see if the fault can be reproduced.

I have same problems , with 3 pcs all of them witndows 10 , with different versions of ati , 2018,2019,2020, even after I reconfigure the mail settings etc..after 2 minutes it's again lost 

Gabriel, welcome to these public User Forums.

I have just checked one of my tasks which I had to reconfigure yesterday and the changes are held for me.

Please submit Feedback to Acronis using the tool provided in the ATI GUI Help section with a reference to this forum topic so that Acronis get an idea of how many users are being impacted by this issue.

BrunoC wrote:

For someone who had this happen, it would be interesting to see if there were any updates to the runtimes just prior to seeing the error. Since I didn't have the issue, I can't really test it. It would also be worth getting one of the prior scripts and trying to run it through the libraries to see if the fault can be reproduced.

Bruno, my Windows 10 Update history does not show any updates for several weeks on my laptop where this issue happened to me.  The only exception is for Windows Defender which has daily updates.

gabriel friedman wrote:

I have same problems , with 3 pcs all of them witndows 10 , with different versions of ati , 2018,2019,2020, even after I reconfigure the mail settings etc..after 2 minutes it's again lost 

Gabriel, can you do an experiment please.

1. Configure the backup with the mail settings. Exit ATI and look at the script file to see if the mail settings look OK.

2. If the settings look OK, open ATI and look at the email notification. If it seems to be gone, do not change anything but immediately check the script file again. Is the email setting still OK?

3. Change something else in the backup task, but not the email, and then save it. Look at the script again. Is the email lost?

Steve, I've not been able to see this issue here. I was hopeful today when I ran a test and then did a Windows update but it worked fine before and after.

Nothing apparent in your Windows Update history. There are lots of other updates that happen all the time... program installations, Windows Apps, etc.

Just too much coincidence that it happens on some systems, not all,  but across many ATI versions. What's the commonality?

I haven't noticed any of the problems mentioned in this thread, but I don't have notification emails configured so I might not notice the changes.  I do see that that the timestamps on the script files matches the completion time of the backups.  ATI apparently rewrites the script file (or at least changes the timestamp ... which seems unlikely) when a backup finishes.  I have no idea why it does this, but that certainly provides opportunity for ATI to make the changes reported in this thread.

(I hope I didn't just state the obvious.) 

Patrick, when a new backup file is written, the script file is updated with a <volume_location> tag for that file. It keeps track of all the files written for the chain.

I have now had this issue on two of my Win 10 computers but it didn't hit my sole Win 7 PC..!

The latest PC was running ATI 2018 so I collected some screen images to show how the issue manifests with or without notifications being configured.

The three symptoms that I am seeing & which are being reported by other users are:

1. Email notifications are lost (if were configured).
2. Automatic cleanup is turned off.
3. Exclusions list entries are reordered to move the pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys & swapfile.sys to the end of the listing.  This latter one is not immediately noticeable!!

Note: All the screen images are captured from .tib.tis files from ATI 2018 showing how the XML script looks today, and how it had looked on 21/10/2019 (prior to the change).

First image above is as is today, second as it was on 21/10.

Again, the first 2 images show how the exclusions are ordered today, and the second 2 how they were on 21/10.

The missing automatic cleanup option is harder to spot in the .tib.tis files but is shown by the difference in the lines below:

21/10 Store no more than 2 recent version chains =
<quota chain_count="2" scheme_flags="18" type="8" />

25/10 No automatic cleanup enabled =
<quota scheme_flags="2" type="0" />

These lines come after the traffic_quota line shown in the image above.

Attached the above images below for ease of viewing separately if wanted.

Steve, as for the file_mask tags, there are a number of them which are reordered. I can't match up the before and afters as it looks like things are missing between the two views of the same file. Have you verified that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two lists.

Bruno, I haven't checked every entry but I am definitely seeing hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys & swapfile.sys moved to the bottom of the exclusions list on multiple different Win 10 computers along with all email details lost and automatic cleanup turned off.

Another of my PC's did backups last night and all emails were missing this morning so another that I now need to go change back again!

Late update: I have now had to reset 6 different Win 10 computers because of this issue, all of them lost automatic cleanup settings, email notifications, and those with backups to the Acronis Cloud were reset to default cloud retension settings. 

One laptop managed to make a NAS backup on the local C: drive resulting in getting low disk space warnings from Win 10 then had to have the NAS backup reconfigured & run before it would show that any backups had been run at all!

I have been battling similar issues for a few days now.  For me it started following the failure of my SSD boot drive which I replaced and then used an Acronis backup to recover the new SSD.

The first backup following this failed due to a supposed lack of space despite my NAS having over 5.5TB free.  The ensuing investigation showed that the backup had been written to the small C: drive despite the GUI still showing the destination as the NAS.

Since this I have had no end of issues, mainly my backup scheme and cleanup get reverted to some incremental 'initial' setting after a successful backup using the intended scheme. I have 2 main tasks, both backup the 'entire PC' one uses a differential scheme to my NAS and one a weekly single version scheme to my survival kit.  Both of these tasks run as planned once then the scheme gets overwritten.  I have been working with Acronis support and they have had me uninstalling and reinstalling several times a day in an attempt to fix this all to no avail. 

I thought that this was something to do with my machine since it started after the SSD failure - I am relieved to find that this seems to be something more widespread.  I have not actually noticed whether my notification settings have been affected because, quite frankly, that is the least of my problems.  I have now sent a link to this thread to my support ticket, so hopefully they will see that this is not an isolated incident and work out a fix for it.

Blofeld, thanks for adding your comments.  The misdirected NAS backup has only happened the once for me that I am aware of but seeing your comments, I will now double check my other computers to be sure that it has been a 'one-off' event for me?

Please let us know what Acronis support come back to you with?

Steve S - I will definitely keep this thread updated if I find a cure.

In the meantime I have added a screenshot of what my planned schemes are replaced with.  This is consistent for me and it would be interesting if everyone sees the same settings

Mine were the same with automatic cleanup turned off until re-enabled!

I only found the 1 computer out of 6 affected that wrote the NAS backup to the local drive instead of the NAS.  I checked the logs (ti_demon and backup_worker) and these showed no issue as if the backup was written correctly despite the fact that it wasn't!

I have a long running differential backup that was changed to being incremental due to this issue!

This was the only differential on this computer so the change is even more obvious!  All the other tasks were incremental so were defaulted to be the same except for no longer having any cleanup option enabled, loss of email notification etc.

Same here: Windows 7, ATIH 2020. Last week all backup tasks worked fine, today all backup option settings are reverted to Standard and I've to made all tasks new with a new set of backup files. 

Hi,

I also had this problem. And I found a temporary fix for it. 

I wrote  a subject about it here (Did not find this thread before I posted):

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2019-forum/managed-machine-service-wipes-out-settings

In my case it was the service "Managed Machine Service" that caused the problem.

Erik, thank you for sharing your experience and finding here.

Note: if the MMS service is causing an issue, then set it to be Disabled in the main Services.msc control panel, which should stop it being automatically restarted after a Windows restart.

Hi everyone. I am new here. Thanks for the useful information. 

Hi Steve,

If the MMS is the culprit here can we happily disable it whilst Acronis fix the issue? What is it used for?

Thanks

Blofeld wrote:

Hi Steve,

If the MMS is the culprit here can we happily disable it whilst Acronis fix the issue? What is it used for?

Thanks

As far as I have been able to study the information of this service it is mainly (only?) communicating with the online dashboard. I have deactivated it and it has caused no problem at all.
(Except that the online dashboard looks very unupdated - but it did that also before)

Steve Smith wrote:

Erik, thank you for sharing your experience and finding here.

Note: if the MMS service is causing an issue, then set it to be Disabled in the main Services.msc control panel, which should stop it being automatically restarted after a Windows restart.

I am not sure that is quite correct.
In other kb-articles / topics they have claimed that it can be restarted by Acronis software in some cases.
And especially, of course, if system is updated.

(But mine has stayed disabled for 2 days now - so far so good)

P.S. The reason I used the expression "deactivated" is because in my Swedish version of Windows 10 that is how they translated "disabled" ("inaktivera") and that is probably the closest translation possible.

I discovered a similar issue yesterday. I always run full backups but noticed that the settings has changed from Full to Incremental. It changed the 23/10.

Since the backup takes a couple of minutes i often start the backup and leave the workstation so it took a couple of days to discover this. Yesterday i noticed that the backup never Validated and when i looked deeper i noticed that the backup scheme was changed and that Validation was un-checked.

Since i have Active Protection enabled in TI2020 one wonder how things just can change due to what seems to be a Windows component. I can´t even move backupfiles without disabling Active Protection but a Windows component can change and mess up a backup scheme without any problems.

-- Windows 10 Pro, 1903, build 18362.418 --

Roger A wrote:

I discovered a similar issue yesterday. I always run full backups but noticed that the settings has changed from Full to Incremental. It changed the 23/9.

Since the backup takes a couple of minutes i often start the backup and leave the workstation so it took a couple of days to discover this. Yesterday i noticed that the backup never Validated and when i looked deeper i noticed that the backup scheme was changed and that Validation was un-checked.

Since i have Active Protection enabled in TI2020 one wonder how things just can change due to what seems to be a Windows component. I can´t even move backupfiles without disabling Active Protection but a Windows component can change and mess up a backup scheme without any problems.

-- Windows 10 Pro, 1903, build 18362.418 --

 

 

 If it was 23/10 (not 23/9) ?

The reason might very well be connected to the problem in this thread.

I just added an update to what I was writing in my topic about the problem:
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2019-forum/managed-machine-service-wipes-out-settings

I'll add my 2 cents here. I have not seen this issue with ATI 2019 as others have reported. I'm running ATI 2019 build 17750 on two machines that are backed up every night with no loss of the settings during the time frames reported by others. Managed machine services is active and running on both machines. I'm in the USA if that makes a difference.

Thomas, just to bring together the factors here:  This issue has affected users on both Windows 10 and 7, and using ATI 2018, 2019 & 2020.

Erik's scenario is slightly different for one computer that the settings are being reset again after being reconfigured when the Acronis MMS service is active, but he has other computers where MMS didn't do this.

I have 6 different PC's / laptops all hit by this issue on or after 22/10 that I have MMS active on and not seen Erik's reset of settings after correcting them.

I do not believe that this is a Windows issue as none of my computers show any evidence of any updates being involved for the dates known, therefore my conclusion is that this is something triggered from Acronis!  All of my computers are signed in to my Acronis account so the potential involvement of MMS is a real possibility for a culprit here.

I know that backups can be triggered from the Acronis web Dashboard for remote machines and I have used that feature in the past, but this issue suggests that the same feature can also be used to change backup task settings / reset them back to original Acronis defaults!  That latter aspect is worrying to say the least and something I have never encountered previously over more than 10 years of using ATI.

Erik Linder wrote:

I've been without power for two days and now come back to see this thread. First I read that it happened under Windows 7 too, which really made me curious. And I just could not get the problem to reproduce here.

And then I read Erik's discovery. Kudos to you, Erik! Who's have thunk it!

On my ATI 2019 machine, I run with Managed Machine Service Mini disabled. On my ATI 2020 test machine I leave everything enabled so I'm thinking maybe it happened just that one day and would not repeat, and since I was not testing anything for a couple days and the machine was off it was spared.

Anyway, it was wracking my brain trying to come up with some explanation. But I do concur with Steve's last statement... this is worrying to say the least. I do hope we will at some point get a clearer picture of what happened.

And now, I have about 12 hours before they again shut down the power for another two days.

OFF TOPIC WARNING

@BrunoC, being without power for that long must be very inconvenient. In Australia we are seeing an early bushfire season but nowhere near as severe as in California. I do not recall the Australian grid operator ever resorting to closing the grid to avoid problems as is now happening in part of California. There are multiple instances where fires have been traced back to grid failures (all too frequently due to poor maintenance). There are similarities in the ways such fires behave on West Coast USA and East Coast Australia - in extreme emergencies fire crews from Australia go to USA and the revers happens also.

Ian

Steve Smith wrote:

Thomas, just to bring together the factors here:  This issue has affected users on both Windows 10 and 7, and using ATI 2018, 2019 & 2020.

Erik's scenario is slightly different for one computer that the settings are being reset again after being reconfigured when the Acronis MMS service is active, but he has other computers where MMS didn't do this.

I have 6 different PC's / laptops all hit by this issue on or after 22/10 that I have MMS active on and not seen Erik's reset of settings after correcting them.

I do not believe that this is a Windows issue as none of my computers show any evidence of any updates being involved for the dates known, therefore my conclusion is that this is something triggered from Acronis!  All of my computers are signed in to my Acronis account so the potential involvement of MMS is a real possibility for a culprit here.

I know that backups can be triggered from the Acronis web Dashboard for remote machines and I have used that feature in the past, but this issue suggests that the same feature can also be used to change backup task settings / reset them back to original Acronis defaults!  That latter aspect is worrying to say the least and something I have never encountered previously over more than 10 years of using ATI.

 

 

Steve. I appreciate your summarizing the issue but no where did I imply it was a Windows issue. I was merely stating the fact that I haven't seen the issue even though there are numerous reports from folks that have. Both of my machines are signed in to the dashboard also. I'm just adding another data point that may useful to help Acronis pin down the problem.

I agree that its most likely something caused by Acronis give the wide variety of TI versions and machines involved.

What a mess, same here...

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/all-tasks-stopped-working-and-are-now-corrupt

An update from me.

Going back the when I thought this was an isolated incident for me alone and caused by my SSD failure which occurred overnight on the 22/10 coincidentally.  During all the uninstalling and reinstalling of ATI I tried 2019 build 17750 on one occasion and that showed the same behaviour of losing settings.

Following Erik's excellent detective work, I disabled MMS.  I did not reset the database or scripts but went to my 2 tasks and reset the settings back to the ones I had originally.  I fired off the task aimed at my NAS, but it wrote the backup to my C: drive (it has done that a lot for me) despite the GUI indicating the NAS as the destination.  Once I reselected the NAS as the correct destination all worked well and as expected.  The task with an external drive as destination work fine straight away.

Since then I have been running both tasks often both manually and using the scheduler and the settings are maintained after each backup (hooray).

I have pointed support at these forum threads, but they seem more interested in getting a process monitor log from me than actually hearing what their customers are saying.  If anyone gets anything more constructive from Acronis themselves please let us know.

Hey everyone,

If you have not sent us a feedback with a system report attached, could you, please, do it?

I think it needs to be investigated ASAP.

Please, do a reference to this forum post, I will find all the incoming reports and send them to development.

Renata, I believe I have already submitted Feedback along with a System Report recently for this or another issue.

Update: Feedback sent from 2 other computers with reports.

I opened a support case [04200411] on 10/27 but until today got no answer.

Thank you for the sent reports! Please, keep them coming.

We are actively investigating what happened. 

Bug number for reference is TI-180184.

I've seen no mention of ATI 2017, so I'd like to record that it also suffered from the same problems as the later versions on 22 October.