Split Image Files at 4,000 MB and Archive Integriy Check ?

Discussion in 'Paragon Drive Backup Product Line' started by garioch7, Nov 19, 2011.

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  1. garioch7

    garioch7 Registered Member

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    Location:
    Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada
    Hello all. My first posting here. I finally had to migrate to a new backup solution after ATIH2011 and ATIH2012 issues.

    I note that the Paragon Help is not really very detailed. I am wondering about the default option to split image files at 4,000 MB (or another size). Is that necessary or is it advantageous; and, if so, why? I am running Win7 HP x64 and backing up to and external WD My Book Essential 2 TB drive.

    Also, I don't see any way, as there was in Acronis, to include the archive integrity step into the backup job. It seems that you must first backup and then manually initiate the backup integrity check.

    Please forgive the stupid questions. I am new to the product and like what I see so far, but it will take some time to get comfortable after 5 years using Acronis products.

    Thanks for any assistance. Have a great day.

    Regards,
    -Phil
     
  2. seekforever

    seekforever Registered Member

    Joined:
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    I also migrated here after years with Acronis. To be honest, TI never let me down but I only do manual images of my C drive, data is done with SyncBack and important data is never kept on C. TI had many more bells and whistles than I required. Paragon Free was all I needed but since they had some attractive price offerings I now have licenses for the regular product. The idiotic True Image user-interface from my point of view and other automated things like an archive validation that popped up just when you didn't want it made me abandon them. The bugs that accompany every new release were also irritating especially since that has happened at every release since TI9 and maybe before so that's TI9, TI10, TI11, TI2009, TI2010, TI2011 and TI2012. There was a wealth of information on their forum about problems, user-complaints, etc but they never appeared to pay attention to it when it came to a new release.

    In spite of the moaning at the Acronis forum, at least Acronis staff do have a look at the forum and try to provide solutions, Paragon's presence here is zero unless they just lurk.

    The activity on this forum compared to the TI one is very, very little. That may be good or it may be that a lot of people have an unwarranted trust in the program. There appears to be a small number of knowlegeable people that post here but nothing like that on the TI forum and I'm not sure the Paragon program gets the flogging the power-users on the TI forum give TI.

    I found that the Paragon rescue CD on both the free 2011 and paid product, B&R10 Home, did not do a verify - not that it failed, it just came back almost instantaneously and said done. I reported it to Paragon support and they came back and said it was a bug and it would be fixed. It has been fixed in the paid B&R11 program (don't know about others) but I didn't get notified it was fixed. What I find strange is that the programs had been out for a while and I was the first person to report ito_O Maybe nobody using Paragon ever bothers to verify at least from the boot CD level which is actually a fairly good method of seeing if their Linux recovery environment can locate and successfully read and re-create the checksums without doing an actual restore test (which is best).

    The other confusing thing is Paragon's optional setting to write the data for integrity checking when the archive will be restored. That's very nice but the time you don't want to find out it is a dud is when you need to restore it. The best I can determine is this setting creates the checksums in the archive and if you don't select it, then it will be a bit faster. This is not an error-correcting code that gets written to the archive.

    The other confusing thing is the Summary before the backup commences says "Archive integrity will be checked". Well, I would love somebody to prove me wrong but I AFAIK the integrity is not checked. I asked Paragon if it did a read after writing but they said no.

    Your question about it automatically doing an integrity check is valid. Paragon seems to like people to use its Paragon Scripting Language for clever things. It seems to be idiotic that they couldn't put in a setting to have the verification done automatically. By this statement I'm asking any Paragon user who really knows what is going on explain to me why there shouldn't be the ability to have the archive checked after creation. The normal method of HD operation is to compare the CRC upon reading, not writing and if the disk has a bad sector then it is too late.

    I looked at possibly using the scripting to do the verify but since I like adding comments to my archives, using a descriptive filename for the archive such as "BackupB4InstallingOffice" it looks like a non-starter since the only keyboard input is for confirming an operation by pressing "Y" (Ask command). Given this, and since I do non-scheduled backups, the manual verification is not too bad but still dumb. I have no intention of writing a program to open a Paragon script and insert my filename, comments and whatever.

    I find the 4G split to be OK. It isn't essential and it allows you create or copy the archive files to DVD. It also allows the use of a FAT32 disk since it's maximum filesize is 4GB. I don't really care for giant files in the tens of GB so I'm happy with the 4GB default.
     
    Last edited: Nov 19, 2011
  3. Robin A.

    Robin A. Registered Member

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    Splitting images is only necessary if the image is going to be copied to DVD5 disks, which is not a good practice anyway.

    I agree with the comments about this Paragon forum in Wilders. It is not very useful to users. Very different from the old Acronis forum here, which was really good.

    One problem is that there are too many Paragon programs with overlapping functions and confusing names, including the several "free" programs, which I have always seen as unreliable marketing hooks.

    About verifying images: I always verify them after creation in a WinPE environment. This option has never failed to me.
     
  4. garioch7

    garioch7 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Nov 17, 2011
    Posts:
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    Location:
    Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada
    Thank you both for the information. I will uncheck the 4 GB limit box since I never write to DVDs and I am not using a FAT file system.

    Have a great day.

    Regards,
    -Phil
     
  5. JosephB

    JosephB Registered Member

    Joined:
    Jan 3, 2008
    Posts:
    310
    garioch7,
    If you are performing your backup as a scheduled job, you can add an Integrity Verification Step to your backup job, by modifying your backup job's script, as I described in the following thread:

    https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=310822
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2011
  6. garioch7

    garioch7 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Nov 17, 2011
    Posts:
    93
    Location:
    Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada
    Thanks, Joseph for the information. That's very helpful. Have a great day.

    Regards,
    -Phil
     
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