if Acronis initially fails - run memtest ...

Thanks to everyone who coaxed me into running memtest

After running it I discovered faulty RAM and after further "coaxing" decided to replace the RAM module.

Now Acronis backs up and verifies as it was unable to before and the store told me "it's very good that you discovered the problem otherwise your Windows system might have gone down eventually".

I almost backed away from running the test and initially recoiled at the thought of replacing the RAM (in my case the store did it free of charge and on the spot - after testing the new ram for 2 hours) thinking, "my system runs so well why do I want to cause myself agro?"

Anyway if you have back up and verify problems, my suggestion would be, run the test and if it fails replace the ram.

thanks again,

Michael

 

This is a great point Michael! I wonder how much of the Corrupt Image posts on this forum are actually due to faulty RAM. RAM issues can sometimes go undetected for a long time (as you said, your machine was otherwise running just fine) and so it's not an intuitive solution to think about RAM when backup failure occurs. So many people get on here screaming at Acronis when their images get corrupt. And then Acronis blames the user's hardware, and really it gets no where. Sometimes it is a drive issue, but the RAM can also be the culprit. So this is great advice.

And the Memtest is so easy to run, it's worth the trouble to verify and rule that out as a potential cause of the problem.

Thanks for your post.