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First, I'm running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 and the software firewall that comes with Bitdefender Total Security.
I have my backups scheduled to run at 3 AM every day and they've been running successfully for a long time. When I went to my PC on Saturday morning (July 29) and woke it from Sleep mode as usual, I noticed that the normal IDrive pop-up notification showing me that the backup had run successfully (or unsuccessfully) was not showing nor did I receive an email notifying me of a backup failure. There was nothing in the IDrive logs showing that the July 29 backup had even tried to run. I then manually ran the backup and everything ran fine. Now I wake up today (Sunday, July 30) and again the backup has failed to run—and again, there was no IDrive pop-up notification for the backup job, no "failure" email received and no entry in the logs showing anything for that backup.
I hadn't changed any backup or firewall settings. I checked the IDrive Scheduler settings and they look OK—set for backing up every day at 3 AM, email notification on failure and "Notify me on desktop" checked.
I did install Windows update KB5028412 (Cumulative Update Preview for .NET Framework 3.5, 4.8 and 4.81) on July 27, but the July 28 scheduled backup ran successfully.
I also rebooted my PC yesterday.
I'm at a loss to explain what's going on.
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The backup did NOT run again early this morning.
More IDrive settings on my PC:
Under Settings:
Continuous Data Protection is OFF
Open file backup is ON
Notify as "Failure" if the total files failed for backup is more than 5% of the total files backed up
Alert me if the scheduled backup fails for 1 day
Wake up the computer from Hibernate/Sleep mode
Upload multiple file chunks simultaneously
I did notice one odd thing. If I right-click on the IDrive icon in the Notification Area (System Tray) and select Status, I get a pop-up window stating, "Your next scheduled backup will start on 07/28/2023 11:16." 07/28/2023 is the last date on which my normal 03:00 backup job ran successfully. I do not know where the 11:16 time in the pop-up window comes from; I never had a scheduled backup job set for that time.
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An attempted fix:
I followed up on that last pop-up window message. I went into the IDrive program, went to Settings and clicked on "View and manage all scheduled jobs." In addition to my regular backup job, I saw another job listed that started with "backupnow" and including the admin account on my PC (I normally run as a Standard user.) The time to run for this job was listed as 11:16 (aha!—see my prior post), but no days were checked for it to run. At this point, my thinking was that, since this was shown in the pop-up as the next scheduled job, maybe that job was stuck in a queue and was preventing my regular job from running. I still have no idea where that extra job came from.
So I first copied the contents of my c:\programdata\IDrive folder to a new temp folder. Then I repeated the steps in the prior paragraph and deleted that extra scheduled backup job. I had had some issues running "backup now" backups about 18 months ago and, with tech support, had used an edited .INI file to fix the issue. Therefore, if something had gone wrong after deleting that backup job, I wanted to have a backup of the IDrive configuration files. I did a "backup now" backup on a test file just now and it worked—excellent!
Now I'll wait to see if the regular backup job runs tomorrow morning.
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PROBLEM SOLVED!
Deleting that mysterious "other" backup job apparently fixed things. My regular scheduled early morning backup was successful.
I'll leave this thread here in case anyone else has a similar problem.
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It happened again. My backup didn't work for Aug. 29—but this time I knew what to do.
I deleted the backup job that was listed as being under the Admin account. But what triggered that backup job?
I had done two nonroutine things the day before—I had installed a Windows update (KB5029847) for .NET Framework (necessitating a reboot) and I had logged into the Admin account to fix an antimalware issue that was apparently caused by that update. Bitdefender Antivirus had been replaced by Windows Defender and the Windows firewall was running in place of Bitdefender's firewall. I could fix that only by using the Admin account since Bitdefender does not allow a Standard user to change some of the configuration settings. I never went into the IDrive program while I was logged into the Admin account and yet somehow that rogue backup job was created.
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I just logged into the Admin account, logged back out and reviewed the backup jobs in IDrive.
There were no rogue backup jobs listed. So I'm thinking it was either the Windows update or the update in conjunction with logging into the Admin account. Either way, it *seems* like the Windows update was involved with the problem.
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