Corrupt archive which had been verified correct

Last week I had a blue screen of death on my laptop (XP Professional) which corrupted the hard drive. Only the day before I had verified my backup and it passed. However when trying to re-install the image it came up with a corruption in the archive and stopped about half-way through.

In the end I had to resort to a previous full backup (good job I swap external hard drives every week) for the image restore and then managed to get my documents etc from the latest backup without any problem.

My original installation of TI v9 was the first build and I have just downloaded the 2337 build and installed it, but what confidence can you give me that my archives which are reported as verified truly are usable.

Thanks

David Anson

 

There's no 100% sure way to guarantee that any file will not be corrupted at some point.

Best you can do, in addition to relying upon the built-in method TI uses, is to find a reliable way to compare the content of the archive with the content just backed up.

TI allows you to mount each backed up drive as a virtual drive.
YOu can then use some tool that does either, or both, of the following:

1. I believe that there are tools, free or not, that will compare the content of ALL files on two drives. So you could compare a real drive with its corresponding virtual drive. If the tool works correctly, this is a useful choice.
But a full compare can take a long time.

2. An alternative is to use a program that allows you to compare information about the drive. For example, you can use the program at http://www.standards.com/index.html?GetfileTypeDistribution
to produce a report listing all the file types on the drive, and the number of bytes and files for each file type. The report can be saved as either a text file (easier for comparisons) or in an Excel workbook. You would then compare the reports for the real drive and the corresponding virtual drive. When doing such a comparision do not choose the option to include percentages, and use your favorite file comparison tool (the built-in FC command in a command prompt window is adequate.

Note that even after doing such a verify, the backup archive could still be corrupt when you try to read it at some point, there just are no guarantees.

 

Did you try it more than once? I have had 2 instances of an "Archive corrupted" message when doing a restore after the archive was verified OK upon creation. This is HD to HD which I consider the most likely method to work! Trying it a second time worked OK. I also now always select a Verify before Restore. I can't find anything wrong with my hardware so based on my experience and some others, I think something is marginal somewhere, may be TI, may be something else.

Since I am restoring C the above is when using the Recovery CD or standalone linux program. Machine has SATA drives.

 

There were some problems with early builds of version 9. The one that seems to be affecting you is that a rescue CD created from some early builds gave false indications as to the validity of backups. If you have not already done so I suggest you check "help about" to make sure that you have build 2337 correctly installed. If all is OK create a fresh rescue CD and check again your latest backup. You should find that it will now verify and can be restored from.
If perchance your update to build 2337 has not been sucessfull use add remove programs and then install 2337 afresh and continue as above.

Xpilot