All backups write to the same externally connected drive, labeled H: drive. I run Incremental backups every night and Differential backups once a week. The backups are run at a time that it is not being used by an operator. The Incremental backup from yesterday reported success and created files on the backup drive. After that backup was completed I started a Differential backup.

The Differential backup failed and reported "Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - A device which does not exist was specified."
Looking through the Differential backup log I note that it reported "Seagate Backup Plus Drive (H - Free Space 980.72 GB. It also reported "I/O Performance: Read 1.7 Gb/s - Write 261.5 Mb/s " which makes it appear that it is using the correct drive and has no problems finding the drive.

The successful Differential backup log just one hour earlier reported "Seagate Backup Plus Drive (H - Free Space 988.90 GB" and "Read 797.7 Mb/s - Write 268.3 Mb/s "

This same failure and error message for the previous weekly Differential backup also occurred. So I have a pattern of failure of the Differential back but complete success of the incremental backups

One month ago after my Incremental backup failed with error message "Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - A device which does not exist was specified."
I tried running it the next morning and it failed again with different but similar error ""Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - The device is not ready.".

In desperation I tried reinstalling the Macrium software and it has been running fine until the past few days.

+x

 

dpholmstrom - 26 October 2020 4:34 PM

All backups write to the same externally connected drive, labeled H: drive. I run Incremental backups every night and Differential backups once a week. The backups are run at a time that it is not being used by an operator. The Incremental backup from yesterday reported success and created files on the backup drive. After that backup was completed I started a Differential backup.

The Differential backup failed and reported "Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - A device which does not exist was specified."
Looking through the Differential backup log I note that it reported "Seagate Backup Plus Drive (H - Free Space 980.72 GB. It also reported "I/O Performance: Read 1.7 Gb/s - Write 261.5 Mb/s " which makes it appear that it is using the correct drive and has no problems finding the drive.

The successful Differential backup log just one hour earlier reported "Seagate Backup Plus Drive (H - Free Space 988.90 GB" and "Read 797.7 Mb/s - Write 268.3 Mb/s "

This same failure and error message for the previous weekly Differential backup also occurred. So I have a pattern of failure of the Differential back but complete success of the incremental backups

One month ago after my Incremental backup failed with error message "Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - A device which does not exist was specified."
I tried running it the next morning and it failed again with different but similar error ""Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - The device is not ready.".

In desperation I tried reinstalling the Macrium software and it has been running fine until the past few days.

You may want to post the contents of the log showing the failure for the folks here to examine.  Note that your license key appears at the bottom of the log so you may want to blacken that out. 

EDIT;  Until someone else gets back to you, try using a different computer port and/or attachment cable.  For some reason your backup disk is intermittently unavailable.

A feeble guess:  Could your external drive have a power-saving mode where it goes to sleep and doesn't wake up fast enough for Reflect?  The "does not exist" error is clearly not accurate, but maybe that I Reflect misinterpreting and unexpected status.  The "not ready" error would certainly be appropriate for that situation.

First, thank you for the suggestions.

I waited a while for this reply to see if the problem was resolved and the advice to use a different UBS port seems to solve the problem. I have noted that the same problem showed up again after I had been plugged in to the new port for about three weeks. I have taken to moving the connection every couple weeks.