Backup forum

Have you tried setting IDriveService to Automatic (Delayed Start)?

DaveLab wrote:

Interesting. Would this be a way to address my theory? How is the exact delay time determined with this setting, do you know?

As I understand it, services set to Delayed Start are started 2 minutes after the last non-delayed service starts.

The time can be modified in the Registry at HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\AutoStartDelay. The value (REG_DWORD) is in milliseconds, so 1 minute would be 60000.

I would suggest you stick with the default and see if that works for you!

I've been seeing the exact same issue ever since I started using IDrive. In my case I run local backups over the network to my NAS, which is mounted as the N: drive. If the computer is sleeping when the backup starts then it gets woken up, just as it should, but the backup then fails, reporting this (from the most recent such failure in my logs):

[ERROR] [01/13/2021 4:00:15] [Unable to continue the scheduled Backup. Reason:  Drive N:\ is not connected.]

And, as you say, when I check it afterwards the N: drive is always connected and accessible. I too think that the issue is probably with the timing, with IDrive attempting to start the backup too quickly, before the OS has completed mounting the external drive.

My (partial) solution has been to schedule the local backups to start at midnight so that the PC will often still be awake if I've been working on it until reasonably late. I guess that a better workaround solution could be to schedule something to run and wake up the PC 5 minutes before the local backups are scheduled.

I don't think that the delayed start suggestion above will work. When the computer wakes from sleep Windows just continues from where it left off. The services were already running, and I'm pretty sure that they should just continue to run and not get restarted. If I'm correct there then this setting won't come into play. Edit: I just noticed that the poster is seeing the issue with the backup running at power-up, so the the task delayed start suggestion might well work for that case; it won't work for my case of the backup running and waking the PC from sleep.

Ian

Last edited by IanPul (2021-01-23 19:33:03)

UPDATE: after some back-and-forths with IDrive tech support, they've made some changes on "the back end" as they say (I guess that means on their end) and they asked me to define on my end an end-of-day cut-off time three hours after my scheduled run time. I did that. Still getting the "drive not available" prompt on boot-up sometimes.

Next I'll try increasing the delayed start time as per above and report back.

Hmmm... I just tried to go to "SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\AutoStartDelay" in my registry, and there is no such AutoStartDelay folder or key. ???

Last edited by DaveLab (2021-01-31 18:52:43)

DaveLab wrote:

Any ideas why setting a backup cutoff time would solve the "drive not connected" prompt/issue?

Sounds like it probably won't. I previously reported an issue (that still persists) where I can't delete entries from the excluded files list in the settings. Their support rep asked me to send them the error report, and then suggested that I enable Windows volume shadow copy and "try the backup again". I wasn't actually having any issues with doing backups, so that was pretty obviously not relevant, but I made the change anyway, to no effect as expected. My guess is that if the support guys don't know the answer then they probably look at your error report and send you back "stock responses" based on anything that they see in there that looks to be possibly set incorrectly.

Ian

Last edited by IanPul (2021-01-31 21:40:13)

5000 hex would be 20480 in decimal.

That would only be about 20 seconds, which is less than the default (120 seconds).

I would suggest doubling the default, so you want 140000 (choose Decimal), or 222E0 in hex.

It doesn't matter whether you enter the value in Dec or Hex.

If you look in the Windows logs (SYSTEM and/or APPLICATION) you should be able to see when IDriveService started compared to other services.