Problems restoring/validating

I've just picked up my first LAN drive (a Freecom 1TB job) and ran a backup onto it overnight. Acronis popped up a couple of errors (could not write to the location) but I clicked retry and it went away. After the backup I was left with four files of varying sizes on the LAN drive totalling 225GB.

I've booted up with the recovery disk that Acronis creates and tried to validate my backups to check that it can see the LAN drive okay. As long as I enter the full path properly (\\FND\\public) it can access it fine, however I receive an error message telling me "This is not the last volume of the backup" when I try to validate any of the four files.

Does anyone have any ideas what's going on? I'm going away over Christmas in a weeks time and I need to have a full backup done before I leave and at the moment I'm left scratching my head with True Image.

 

Forgot to mention, I'm using True Image Home 2009 with XP Pro SP3.

 

What happens if you try the validate within Windows? This might pin down whether or not it is a Linux driver issue (TI CD is Linux) or another problem.

TI needs to read the last part of the archive first since it writes metadata describing the archive at the end of the process.

I'm a bit surprised you got about 4 files for a 225GB archive. Do you have the split size specified that would explain it? For this situation you should have 3 files the same size with the last one being the remainder.

 

Well, I've an inkling that there are four files for the three times throughout the entire backup when it said there was a write error. If this does indeed prove to be the cause of the problem then I imagine I need to solve that rather than the validation error.

There was no split size specified in TI.

I think that the archives actually validated just fine in Windows (I assume so, I left them validating once the backup was done and set it to auto-shutdown and when I returned in the morning my PC was turned off).

I'm considering plugging the LAN drive into a spare USB port and running a new backup shortly and seeing if it makes any difference.

 

I have no idea if the PC being off means all was well but you might look at TI's log file to see what it says.

Although the USB port isn't the same as the LAN port as far as drivers etc goes, it probably isn't a bad place to start since it may be more likely to give you sucess than the LAN, it is also likely to be faster.

If you don't have split size specified and the box is formatted NTFS then you should get one big file. If the box is formatted FAT32 then you will get a bunch of 4GB files.

 

The box is formatted FAT32, (it will only work as a USB drive if I format it to NTFS) however the file sizes for the four chunks are all random and all way over 4GB.

I'm guessing something has messed up somewhere along the line, I'm really not sure what though.

As previously mentioned I'll give it a format to NTFS and have a crack using it as a USB drive, it's all the same to me as long as it results in a working backup.

 

TI normally does not have a problem with FAT32 and the automatically split 4GB files. It knows that each file is part of a multi-file archive. To restore or validate you can just click on any one of the files and TI will do the rest (you do not have to validate or restore each file separately). Do not change any filenames though.

If your backup is 225GB then you certainly would have a lot of 4GB pieces!

 

I think I failed somewhere along the line then. Ah well, lets see if I have any more luck the second time around.

 

For anyone who has been following this I thought I'd finish with an update. I tried again with the LAN drive and it made two files this time. On a FAT32 drive it was managing to create huge files of 100GB+ and then when it would hit a write error and I clicked "retry" it would create a new file. The same problem occurred when I manually set it to 4GB files, it would hit write errors and everything I tried would refuse to validate.

I've just reformatted the drive to NTFS and plugged it into a USB port instead of using it over the LAN and it took an entire full backup in less than three hours (it was taking six-seven over the LAN) with no errors and it validated just fine (again in a couple of hours as opposed to overnight on the LAN).

I'm unsure as to exactly what the problem is but as it's all working fine albeit in USB mode I'm reluctant to go prodding any further.

 

Thanks for giving the update.

It might be interesting and fairly safe to see if you can validate the existing archives over the LAN.

If you haven't, you should boot up the TI rescue CD and see if you can at least validate the archive with it. The reason is that it is Linux not Windows and uses different drivers. If you do a restore of your active partition, typically C, then this is the environment that must work. Once you have confirmed the Linux stuff works on your PC then a Windows validation is fine.

The absolutely best way is to do a test restore to a spare HD.

 

The new USB archive validated fine off the recovery disk. The older ones had been erased as I'd formatted the drive to NTFS and it won't work on the LAN any more unless I stick it back to FAT32, so it's now become a USB drive.

At the end of the day I've got a backup that validates just fine and I'm quite content that I can use it to recover my system in the event of a hard drive failure, so I'm more than happy.

I'll probably pick up a larger hard drive in the new year so I'll have a chance to see if it will clone onto a new drive then.