Is Your Backup Drive Properly Mounted?
With more and more businesses using External USB drives for their backups, I see a common problem arising with backup failures. The most common cause is that the backup drive has a current status of "safely unmounted" or "safe to remove" similar to when you insert and remove USB flash drives. This is not correct for backups.
Although the system "sees" the drive, and it shows up in "My Computer" as a valid drive, when it is in this state, no files can be written to or read from the drive. The easiest way to fix this is to physically unplug the drives’ USB cable and re-insert it to "re-activate" the drive for read/write operations, or to reboot your system.
If this is a common problem, you may want to check your backup software for a setting that might be called "safely eject drive after backup", or "unmount drive" or even "swap drives" depending on your software and setup. This will leave your drive in the wrong state for the next backup. These settings are really for removable media. If your drive is not removed and stored offline for physical protection, do NOT select these options.
If you have any system questions or concerns, call the CCS Retail Systems Support Department at 800-672-4806 or email us.
-Bryan