Issues with B&R integrity checks of whole disk archives burned to DVD

Discussion in 'Paragon Drive Backup Product Line' started by MrBrian, Jan 23, 2010.

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  1. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    I ran into issues and confusion when doing integrity checking of whole disk archives (comprised of multiple partitions) burned to DVD. The whole disk archives were burned to DVD with the B&R recovery disc, and the integrity checking was done within Windows (because I didn't notice an integrity checking function in the recovery environment).

    a) The first burned DVD has 2 .pbf files on it - disk.pbf and img_d0.pbf. Why? Is this a bug? Perhaps because the file system corresponding to img_d0.pbf is 'unknown'? In any event, to a Paragon B&R newbie such as myself, it was a bit confusing which .pbf file to choose to add to the Paragon database for doing an integrity check; choice of the wrong .pbf leads to checking of only a subset of the whole disk archive. It would seem most logical to me that only one .pbf file, namely disk.pbf, should have been burned to the first DVD.

    b) When doing an integrity check of the whole disk archive (i.e. 'Basic Hard Disk 0' is selected), one would think that the entire whole disk archive would be integrity checked, but a perusal of the listed processed archive files seemed to indicate otherwise. Is this a bug? If it's not a bug, then why do some archive files needn't be checked during an integrity check?

    c) Why are some archive files filled with all 0 bits? This doesn't seem intuitive, given that I used Maximum compression.

    By the way, the specific whole disk archive mentioned above works fine when restored to disk.

    Version of B&R recovery environment used to burn the DVDs: v10.0
     
  2. Paragon_Tommy

    Paragon_Tommy Paragon Moderator

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    Hello MrBrian,

    You'll notice that when you backup multiple partitions, we create a file for each partition. For instance, with two partitions, you'll have img_0 and img_1.PBF. What's also written is the master backup file that links them together. For instance, when you go to restore the entire archive, you would select the disk.PBF, during the wizard, it will indicate that you've selected multiple partitions to restore. If you were to restore a selective partition, then choose the img_0 or img_1 file. Integrity check is not required on the disk.pbf if the size is small, indicating it has no real data, just a pointer file. Where the real data reside in your case is the img 0 and img 1. If you ran a backup of a single partition, the only file written is the disk.PBF.
     
  3. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    Thank you for your reply.

    The disk I backed up has 3 primary partitions and an extended partition. All of them are basic partitions, not dynamic partitions. Thus, there should have been 4 IMG??.pbf files, as well as disk.pbf, correct? Yet there is only 1 IMG??.pbf file present in the disk backup. Would this likely be a bug?
     
  4. Paragon_Tommy

    Paragon_Tommy Paragon Moderator

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    No, actually if you have 4 partitions, you should only have one PBF file and four .000 files.

    Each of those .000 file is the partition archive. If you ever only want to restore an individual partition, you'd select the .000 file. Selecting the PBF file to restore, by default, suggest to the program that you want to restore the entire archive of 4 partitions.
     
  5. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    Here are the contents of the whole disk backup DVDs:

    DVD #1:
    Img_D0.PBF
    Img_D0.001
    Img_D0.002
    Img_D0.003
    Img_D0.004
    Img_D0.005
    Img_D0.006
    Img_D0.007
    Img_D0.008
    INFO.TXT
    DISK.PBF

    DVD #2:
    Img_D0.009
    Img_D0.00A
    Img_D0.00B
    Img_D0.00C
    Img_D0.00D
    Img_D0.00E
    Img_D0.00F
    Img_D0.010
    Img_D0.011
    INFO.TXT
    DISK.PBF

    DVD #3:
    Img_D0.012
    Img_D0.013
    Img_D0.014
    Img_D0.015
    Img_D0.016
    Img_D0.017
    Img_D0.018
    Img_D0.019
    Img_D0.01A
    INFO.TXT
    DISK.PBF

    There are two .PBF files and no .000 files. Are these contents expected for a whole disk backup of 4 partitions?
     
  6. Paragon_Tommy

    Paragon_Tommy Paragon Moderator

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    Hello MrBrian,

    When backing up to DVD/CD, the file format is a little different from what I described. DISK.PBF is a 'roster' sheet of the disk if you will. The file you want to refer to for restore is Img_D0.PBF and the program will request for the next DVD in the sequence. 3 DVD assuming standard 4.7 GB, is a bit small for a full hard drive backup. Tally how many gigabytes you backed up, and approximately 80% of its size will be required. So if you have 80GB of data, and you've only backed up to 15GB of DVDs, then things just didn't add up.
     
  7. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    Is it possible with this format to be able to restore an individual partition instead of the whole disk?
     
  8. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    I've done some more experimentation and I believe I now understand what is occurring here.

    In order for the integrity check to check all of the backup files, I needed to select DISK.PBF from disc 3 as the archive to check. When I selected DISK.PDF from disc 1 as the archive, only the first disc and some of the files on the second disc were checked. When I selected Img_D0.PBF as the archive, the integrity check was almost instantaneous - probably because Img_D0.PBF contains the data from a very small partition.

    There was no warning from the program that I needed to use DISK.PBF from disc 3. I hope that the Paragon developers in future versions add an error messagebox when not selecting the appropriate .PBF when doing an integrity check.
     
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