Ok so backups have been failing lately and upon investigating, Macrium appears to be finding an enormous mystery disk "MSFT XVDD" that doesn't show up in Disk Management.
I can't exclude, because it doesn't appear you can exclude based on disk label. -- any help would be appreciated.  I'm not the only one with this problem, there are many.  
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/ccakny/weird_disk_partitions_appeared_on_my_pc/

Are you running the latest release of Reflect?  Macrium issued an update a while ago to cause Reflect to ignore that specific huge mystery disk.  A similar thing was done when Windows Sandbox was introduced, which caused a disk called "PortableBaseLayer" to be mounted all the time.  Reflect initially looked at that disk until Macrium issued an update causing that disk to be ignored.

In addition to my post above though, I'm not sure why you'd be having trouble excluding that disk.  When you define a backup job, Reflect doesn't include all disks except the ones you specifically exclude.  You have to choose which partitions of which disk(s) you want to back up.  So you could simply edit your definition file to include only your actual internal disk and your backups should work just fine even if for some reason you need to stay on an older release of Reflect prior to the update that caused that disk to be hidden entirely.  Or if you're not using a definition file (though it's recommended), then just make sure that this disk isn't selected in the first step of the backup wizard.

Also, you posted this in the Disk Cloning section of the forum, whereas if you're performing image backups, the Disk Imaging section would have been a better location.

+x

 

jphughan - 26 May 2020 12:11 AM

In addition to my post above though, I'm not sure why you'd be having trouble excluding that disk.  When you define a backup job, Reflect doesn't include all disks except the ones you specifically exclude.  You have to choose which partitions of which disk(s) you want to back up.  So you could simply edit your definition file to include only your actual internal disk and your backups should work just fine even if for some reason you need to stay on an older release of Reflect prior to the update that caused that disk to be hidden entirely.  Or if you're not using a definition file (though it's recommended), then just make sure that this disk isn't selected in the first step of the backup wizard.

Also, you posted this in the Disk Cloning section of the forum, whereas if you're performing image backups, the Disk Imaging section would have been a better location.

Ah well I'm using the site manager to orchestrate 4 backups.  So what happens is I needed to write a definition backup all the disks by default across all 4 PCs, then exclude any problematic ones.  This is 100% related to the windows sandbox thing, but I think a newer version of it that applies to the windows app store.

Reflect Agent Version is 7.2.4898
Reflect App is 7.2.4808 though, so that could be the problem?

If memory serves, that large disk is related to some Xbox gaming capability that was introduced in a recent release of Windows 10.  It was originally reported by people who found it while using a Windows Insider build, and Macrium said that if that functionality made it into a production release, then they would update Reflect to ignore that disk by default.  I believe the former happened, and I'm fairly sure the latter did too, although looking over the release notes, I can't find any explicit note about it.  There's a registry setting that can be applied to have Reflect ignore, i.e completely hide, specific disks by number, but that likely wouldn't be practical if you're having to set this up from Site Manager.  7.2.4808 is a fairly new release, but it's not quite the newest, so if possible you might want to try updating.  Otherwise, hopefully Macrium themselves will have a suggestion for this.

+x

 

mattjpark - 26 May 2020 2:57 AM

+x

 

jphughan - 26 May 2020 12:11 AM

In addition to my post above though, I'm not sure why you'd be having trouble excluding that disk.  When you define a backup job, Reflect doesn't include all disks except the ones you specifically exclude.  You have to choose which partitions of which disk(s) you want to back up.  So you could simply edit your definition file to include only your actual internal disk and your backups should work just fine even if for some reason you need to stay on an older release of Reflect prior to the update that caused that disk to be hidden entirely.  Or if you're not using a definition file (though it's recommended), then just make sure that this disk isn't selected in the first step of the backup wizard.

Also, you posted this in the Disk Cloning section of the forum, whereas if you're performing image backups, the Disk Imaging section would have been a better location.

Ah well I'm using the site manager to orchestrate 4 backups.  So what happens is I needed to write a definition backup all the disks by default across all 4 PCs, then exclude any problematic ones.  This is 100% related to the windows sandbox thing, but I think a newer version of it that applies to the windows app store.

Reflect Agent Version is 7.2.4898
Reflect App is 7.2.4808 though, so that could be the problem?

Thanks for posting.

A change to automatically exclude this disk type is included in Reflect v7.2.4859 and later. (Apologies for missing this off the release notes). The Site Manager Agent will receive the same code update in the next release. Unfortunately we don't have a definitive date for this release yet but it will be in the next week or so. 

In the meantime you can exclude specific disks from being evaluated by setting a registry entry on the client PC. Please see here for more information:

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW72/Excluding+disks+when+Macrium+Reflect+starts+up

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

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Thanks to Nick and jphughan (JP?) --
I did go ahead and update the local reflect app to the latest, no effect as you implied.  Will wait for the update to the Site Manager Agent, and in the meantime make the registry change since this is blocking my backups.

Additionally, I'm going to update the OP with some relevant keywords since I couldn't find a post related to this on the forum.  Would you mind moving my post to the most logical place to be found by someone with the same issue?

Hi Mattjpark,

Would you mind moving my post to the most logical place to be found by someone with the same issue?

I have moved this one to here (the Site Manager forum)

Kind Regards

Stephen

See our reviews on

The workaround for disk exclusion linked above isn't going to work very well since the drive doesn't actually show up in disk management or the Macrium Reflect App in order to retrieve the disk number.  (I can probably guess it's 1 or 2 though)  I can't imagine trying to troubleshoot this 18 months from now when I plug another drive in and forget this workaround was in place, though.

Has Macrium looked into adding the ability to exclude disks by label, type, or vendor (e.g., "MSFT XVDD", "SEAGATE GOFLEX")?  I saw you can exclude a disk by partition label, but since they are unlabeled partitions in this case it's not helpful.

+x

 

mattjpark - 26 May 2020 8:18 PM

The workaround for disk exclusion linked above isn't going to work very well since the drive doesn't actually show up in disk management or the Macrium Reflect App in order to retrieve the disk number.  (I can probably guess it's 1 or 2 though)  I can't imagine trying to troubleshoot this 18 months from now when I plug another drive in and forget this workaround was in place, though.

Has Macrium looked into adding the ability to exclude disks by label, type, or vendor (e.g., "MSFT XVDD", "SEAGATE GOFLEX")?  I saw you can exclude a disk by partition label, but since they are unlabeled partitions in this case it's not helpful.

Hi

From your SM screen shot it's Disk 2 that's the problem so you need to exclude Disk 1 in the registry setting. 

Excluding disk names is a possibility for the future, but the next update of SM will have this particular issue resolved in any case. 

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

See our reviews on