The following is pretty complicated, but I’m hoping that somebody here will have a solution; otherwise, I will have to look for another backup solution. What other backup programs would you recommend?

The same day that Macrium downloaded and installed an update, was the same day that my backup stopped working. Coincidence?

For several years, I’ve been using Macrium Reflect free home edition to do automatic daily backups of my C: drive to an external USB drive.

I noticed that yesterday’s nightly backup did not complete successfully, and according to the log, after running for 13 minutes, Macrium aborted with the following error message:
Initializing
Write Method: Using File System Cache
Validating location: E:\Macrium Daily Backups\ - Invalid (not writable)
________________________________________
Backup aborted! - None of the specified backup locations could be written to

I unplugged the external drive, plugged it back in, and then reran the backup program, getting the following error message:
Backup aborted! - Write operation failed - Access is denied.

However, an image file was created, but with a suffix of ‘.tmp’; note that the size of the image file was about the size of the previous day’s image file.
Note also that Macrium also created a file entitled backup.running in the backup folder, and the existence of that file prevented me from running Macrium again, not until I deleted the backup.running file.

The Macrium website was of no help, and I didn’t find any solutions via Google. You guys are my last hope.

Thanks, Richard.