How do you make sure the new image is ok and free of problems?

I just made my first image of my system drive to an external drive. Is there any possible way to check if it is correct or has any glitches without having to restore my system drive with it?

How do I know that it will really work fine when some day I will have to restore my system drive ?

Also, when I did the backup, I notice that while creating the image other programs like spyware program had run on the background. After several hours of creating the image I got a message saying that the backup operation completed successfully. I am assuming that running other programs on the background will not cause a conflict with the backup operation. But I would like to make sure.

 

Short of temporarily installing a replacement system drive and restoring to it, I reckon the best you can do is boot from the TI rescue CD and use the Check Archive Wizard to verify the image.

Strewth!! Several hours to create an image from within Windows to an external drive . I can backup (Normal compression) and verify 8.5GB of used space to an external USB 2 HD in approx 12 mins.

Is the external drive operating at USB 2 Hi-Speed? Also worth checking whether a corrupt file system on the source drive forced TI into the sector-by-sector backup mode (backing up all sectors of your source drive rather than just the in-use sectors). To do this, run the command chkdsk /r for each partition of your source drive e.g. chkdsk C: /r, chkdsk D: /r, etc.

Regards

 

I was using an external drive with a USB 2 connection connected to my laptop which only has standard USB connection. Upon connecting it said something like: Warning you have connected a high speed USB device into a slower USB port. Would that make the backup procedure slow in that case?

 

USB2.0 is 40 times as fast as USB1.1

USB1.1. transfers at a maximum of 12 Mbits/sec. In practice, somewhat less than that. 1 byte = 8 bits, so let's say your standard USB1.1 port transfers at about 8 megabits=1Mbyte/sec.

Then 8 gigabytes would take 8000 seconds which is a bit more than 2 hours.

 

I performed a Checkdisk command after reading Menorcaman post and found no problems with the structure of my disk. I read your post and you made quite a lot of sense. Since I do not have a USB 2.0 , and the second drive has a high speed USB port but my laptop does not, this is the reason why it takes so many hours to perform a backup. My hardrive backup was about 24 GB. I am ok with that as long it is reliable. Thanks so much for your response.

One odd thing is that I recently bought a PCI Firewire card for my laptop and it took as long as the USB1.1 to perform a backup. Firewire is supposed to be significantly faster but maybe it is because it is using the PCI port? Not sure.

 

Unless I am missing something the "check image" feature on the left side of the True Image window (under tools) is how I check to make sure the image is OK. I check the image it after every full or incremental backup.

Phil

 

There was once a post here suggesting to Plug Image as an additional test for the integrity of the image.

When plugging-in, the access to the image file is probably different than when performing a restore, but still, it lets you see the whole image at once and check the very content of a few particular files you may choose at random.

It does therefore, in my opinion, give more safety - and it's quick and feasible. It doesn't replace the actual test restore, though.

Maybe Support could clarify whether a kind of glitch that would not be detected by Check Archive but would prevent a restore, would send up an error in Plug Image as well.

 

Hello bVolk,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that the corrupted image archive sometimes can be plugged without a problem and so the fact that you are able to plug an image does not eliminate the probability of this particular image archive being actually corrupted and therefore unsuitable for the restoration.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Hi Alexey,

Thank you for your clarification.

It doesn't make me happy, but it will prevent me doing futile checks in future. Kickin' the fog, as we say.

 

As has been pointed out before the only way to be 100% sure that your backups work is to carry out a restore. The only way I know to do this in a completely risk free way is to take out your existing drive and fit a replacement just as you would have to do in the case of a real HDD breakdown.
It is what I do whenever I install a new build of True Image. That way I know beyond all reasonable doubt that my backups work and I have the necessary hardware to hand in the event of a real emergency.

Peace of mind is worth the cost of a spare HDD.

Xpilot.

 

Yes. It's the only way to really know. Of course, you could not do the live test and instead just figure that a new version or build of TI will come out before your hdd crashes and needs to be restored, after all there is a very high probability of the new version coming out first. ;-)