The issue of corrupted TIBs

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Peter Holbrook, Sep 23, 2007.

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  1. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    From what I've read on this forum and my own experience, it seems to me that the issue of having presumably corrupted TIB files, or TIB files for which a never-entered password is required, is a relatively common one.

    I've been a happy user of Acronis True Image Home since before version 9, and up until recently I was able to restore my whole system several times without any trouble. Last January I upgraded my Windows XP to Vista Ultimate, and I was able to use TI 10 once to recover from a full system backup one single file I had accidentally erased. So, no problem there. My troubles began last week, when I upgraded to TI 11. To my surprise, I noticed that if I tried opening a newly created TIB immediately after creating it, it could be read without any problems, but if I tried to read it after rebooting the system, some type of corruption was detected.

    Consequently, I decided to go back to TI 10, but the sky collapsed on my head when I saw the same thing happened! I went even further to TI 9.1, but, alas, the same. I can't go back any further, as I no longer have my old installation CDs.

    From my experience, it appears that either the installation of TI 11 or something else that has changed in my computer pretty recently has caused TI restore to become unreliable, impractical or impossible. I would appear that it can't be a bug in TI itself, as the bug wasn't there back in the days when I used TI 9.1 and 10, so it must be in some interaction between TI and something else.

    Since I have two partitions on my hard drive, I decided to create two stand-alone backups, one of my NTFS C drive, occupying 70Gb and a much smaller one of my FAT32 D drive. I verified that the backup of the D partition was stable. From this I conclude that the bug, or whatever it is, affects only NTFS partitions, or perhaps relatively large NTFS partitions, or just large partitions.

    Can anyone suggest something else that can be tried, other than asking for a full refund? Will the exclusion of the System Folder Information folder solve anything? If some odd condition of Vista itself were to be the culprit, does anyone know how to repair Vista? Don't tell me to get hold of my latest good backup because I can't read my Vista backup!

    Hoping for the best.
    Peter
     
  2. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    How did you try to go back to TI 10? Do you mean that you uninstalled TI 11 and reinstalled TI 10, or did you restore a backup image that was made before you installed TI 11?
    Have you tried doing the restores by booting from the TI Recovery CD instead of starting from Windows?
     
  3. OttoSykora

    OttoSykora Registered Member

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    I found also this kind of problems recently.
    Backup made by IT10 from windows w2k could somply not be restored by the boot CD made by IT10 (corrupted file or so)

    Files made by the boot CD could be restored , but only once after long playing.

    Compare at the end of the restore was not possible since this seems to crash my computer completely.

    When check content after backup checked when started from the boot CD, the PC does crash, when this function is deselected backup operation possible, but not allways a restore is possible, half of the time ending up with error msg saying this file can not be restored, reason is not given.

    Not very nice of software one needs to sure of for emergenicies.
     
  4. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    I uninstalled TI 11 and reinstalled my still existent copy of TI 10. Same thing for TI 9.1. I simply can't open a backup of my NTFS (C) partition.

    Yes, I've also tried that. Contrary to what TI 11 and 10 do of asking for a nonexistent password if I double-click my TIB archive, the emergency boot CD, after navigating to the location where my TIB archive is on my external firewire drive, simply tells me the archive is corrupted. Of course, when not using the emergency CD, if I simply open my TI 9.1/10/11 and navigate to my TIB archive, the program will just tell me my archive is corrupted.

    I even made the archive read-only as soon as my backup was finished. After making it read-only I checked to see if it could be opened and it could. I then rebooted the computer, checked the same archive, which was still read-only, and it was corrupted! What gives?

    Peter:(
     
  5. thomasjk

    thomasjk Registered Member

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    Did you make your backup with TI11? Mustang has reported that TI11 backups cannot be read with TI10 becuase of changes in the archive structure.
     
  6. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    I must confess I'm confused. My tests may have been too hasty, and not every time did I check everything.

    Let me explain. This morning I erased yesterday's last, useless, unreadable backup. After erasing it, I created a full backup of my C (NTFS) and D (FAT32) partitions (on the same disk). The target is always an external firewire HD. Immediately after finishing the backup I checked if it could be read, and everything was fine. Before causing the machine to reboot, I wanted to have an MD5 signature of the TIB archive, so I ran xcsc, which gave me CRC32, MD5 and SHA-1 sums of my TIB archive. I stored the result in a file and rebooted my machine.

    Upon reboot, instead of going straight to open the TIB file, I ran xcsc again, expecting to find some differences. After some 20 or 25 minutes, it reported its sums and, much to my surprise, they were the same as before. So I just double-clicked my TIB archive and, lo and behold, it opened!

    Totally confused, I rebooted my machine. This time around, I double-clicked my TIB file upon resume and the feared corruption message appeared. Wanting to verify an MD5 sum difference, I ran xcsc again. After the usual 20 or 25 minutes, it reported exactly the same sums as before! Utterly confused, I double-clicked the TIB archive once again and, this time, it opened perfectly!

    My provisional conclusion is that perhaps there's an Acronis service that loads upon Windows startup and that Acronis will report archive corruption if one tries to open a backup archive too soon. Is this possible at all? Should we assume that backup files can only be read, say, after five or more minutes have gone by since bootup?

    In any case, this is only a part of the problem some users are experiencing. Perhaps it's a large part of the problem, but I don't think it can explain everything, as these past few days there were several backups I couldn't read even with the Acronis emergency bootup CD. Perhaps even trying to open a TIB archive 'too soon' may in some cases corrupt the archive?

    Bewildered.:eek:
     
  7. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    I made backups with TI 11/10/9.1, and I tried reading them all with the same version that had created them.

    The last archive I made this morning was authored by TI 11, and I've read it successfully a couple of times with TI 11. I haven't tried the emergency CD today.

    Peter
     
  8. 1ondon

    1ondon Registered Member

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    The truth is Acronis don't understand this problem and nor does anyone else. There's a major bug somewhere, but it's never been fingered.

    London
     
  9. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    More data:

    Without rebooting since the last time, I've tried to open the TIB file again. My firewire disk had gone to sleep in the meantime, so it had to wake up. Upon wakeup, Windows tells me the archive is corrupted. I've tried this repeatedly and it's always corrupted, or so it says.

    Xcsc is presently running to calculate the CRC-32, MD5 and SHA-1 checksums. My guess is it'll be the same and that after the checksums are completed the backup I made this morning will be readable for TI once again. I'll keep you posted.

    Peter
     
  10. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    Exactly, just as predicted, xcsc found the same checksums. Immediately after xcsc's report, I double-clicked the on TIB archive and, wonder of wonders, it opened!

    So, from my perspective, most, if not all, of TI's messages that the TIB archive is password-protected (when it isn't) or corrupted are probably false positives because of some odd condition involving some not altogether efficient communication between TI and Windows and/or TI and the underlying backup hardware. In my case, something seems to be obfuscating TI's access to at least some of the archives it created in previous sessions. Only after some time has gone by, or a reliable read operation has been carried out on the archive by an utility like xcsc, can TI reliably read these archives.

    Well, it isn't an ideal situation, but it could be worse. I wish these indications might be useful for some Acronis representative to try and find a permanent solution. In the meantime, I can only suggest that all TI users that have been or are suffering this software shortcoming simply run xcsc on the archive they need to read and see if TI will read it. My hunch is it will!

    All the best.
    Peter
     
  11. peter_nn

    peter_nn Registered Member

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    Do you set ATI to create a single image file?

    I had this problem some time ago. It disappeared after I started to make images divided into 650 or 700 MB chunks.
     
  12. Peter Holbrook

    Peter Holbrook Registered Member

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    Yes, I usually make one single backup of the two partitions on my HD. Currently, the end result is a 70Gb archive stored in my external firewire 500Gb NTFS HD.

    Segmenting the backup into several smaller file is understandable if your backup media has format limitations, such as CD, DVD or FAT32, but if the media is large enough (such as with huge NTFS partitions), I can't see what the advantage of segmenting would be.

    Peter
     
  13. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

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    I always break mine to files that will fit on a DVD just in case I want to copy them later - usually they never get copied. The other reality is that maybe something (TI or elsewhere on your system) just isn't happy dealing with real large files. Running XCSC which fixes the problem may point to some kind of an initialization problem with the system. I use system in a very general sense which means anything, including TI.
     
  14. shieber

    shieber Registered Member

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    I've seen systems where ATI 10 will not validate a tib, even when the PC otherwise handles files, large and small without probs. OF course, diff probs/causes could exhibit the same symptoms on diff systems.

     
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