TrueImage Server: How can a partition bckup be missing files?

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by slaker, Sep 12, 2007.

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  1. slaker

    slaker Registered Member

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    I've got a client using TrueImage Server on a Windows 2003 machine. The machine in question is a file server which hosts about 150GB of AutoCAD drawings.

    The data on that server is shared as part of a dfs replication set with two other servers, held on a RAID1 array, and also backed up twice a night, on two different 750GB firewire drives. All servers appear to have the full set of dfs replicated data, and dfs replication does not happen at night, when my TrueImage backup runs. Client workstations are shut down, so there aren't any open files.

    My defined TrueImage backup job is a monthly full backup and daily incremental partition-level backups of all the disk drives in this server.

    Recently, my client had a very minor data loss. They ran the restore process and found that the data they were looking for was simply not present in any of the backups (full, incremental, going back to the beginning of August, around 40 days of backups). Further investigation on my part revealed a large number of missing files and folders when backups are restored, something in the neighborhood of 20 - 30% of the total volume of data.

    My understanding is that when using the restore feature to recover to a specific day, I should be seeing all the data I have backed up, up to that date. Am I misunderstanding how TrueImage handles an Incremental restore, or am I in some kind of twilight zone where a backup of a whole partition is skipping all kinds of files and not mentioning it in the log files.
     
  2. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    I think that if you restore an incremental, the full backup and all incrementals up to that date should be restored. Any files that were in the full backup or added in any incremental but deleted at any time prior to the date of the last incremental will not be present because the intervening incrementals will delete them.

    Is it possible that the missing files were deleted at some time by your client?

    If so, restoring an earlier incremental after the files were added but before they were deleted should recover them.

    Of course, if they were added and deleted on the same day, they would not be in any backup.
     
  3. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    I know TIserver is supposed to back up Exchange and SQL files, where these the ones that were missing?


    Colin
     
  4. slaker

    slaker Registered Member

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    Nope. I'm backing up an Exchange data store and that's fine (or, at least, the size of data on disk and in the backup is correct. Haven't had to restore anything).
    What I'm missing is mostly AutoCAD-related support files. There may be other things as well, but my client is primarily interested in maintaining data integrity of his CAD files.

    Remember that the data I'm dealing with is distributed via dfs. So I can verify that all this data exists and is complete on three different servers.

    I'm seeing a folder with 46 files and five directories. The data is physically on the drive that's being backed up (i.e. I'm looking at the directory structure on the server and NOT from dfs). It's there. It's valid. It's complete.
    But my TI partition-level backup of that same folder might have 11 files and one subdirectory. The other stuff is just not present at all in my backups, despite the fact that the timestamps on the files in question indicate they have been modified in the range of time my backups should cover.

    I can provide screen shots of this, and I can see multiple examples in my backups. Almost all of what I have checked thusfar, in fact.
     
  5. Thamuz

    Thamuz Registered Member

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    When you say "AutoCAD-related support files", what files are you refering to?

    Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't each AutoCAD drawing represent a structured Database which stores several types of objects?
     
  6. slaker

    slaker Registered Member

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    Honestly, I'm not a CAD guy, so I'm not entirely sure. I'm looking at project folders with .DWG files, .BAK files, some template stuff, togography maps etc. The company uses AutoCAD with a number of add-ons to generate the work they're doing.

    Main thing is, everything is right on their servers but it ain't in my backups and I cannot think of how that could be.

    All I've gotten from Acronis thusfar is "Make sure you have the most recent version of the software, do validations and check TrueImage and Windows logs."
    As far as things go, I do a verify on every backup and all my log files look normal.

    Stuff still isn't in the scheduled backups.

    A full backup, outside the scheduled one, did contain all the data.
     
  7. Thamuz

    Thamuz Registered Member

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    What type of scheduled backup are you performing Incremental or differential?
     
  8. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    slaker,

    You mention that the file timestamps show that the files have been modified since the last backup.

    When TI does an image, it does not use the timestamp values. It goes by whether the data on the sectors have changed. Is it possible that the files were just opened or saved, but no changes were made? In that case, TI wouldn't think the files had changed and would not back them up.

    You do say that they are in the FULL image backup, so TI must see them on the drive.

    Maybe you could check this by actually modifying (making changes to) a CAD file and then running an incremental and seeing if it's in the new image file.
     
  9. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    Aren't BAK files one of the file types that are not automatically backed up?

    It might be worth checking the exclusion list, for that image task.
     
  10. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Image backups don't have exclusion file types, so that can't be the answer. File backups can exclude various file types, but a partition image just reads the sectors.
     
  11. bodgy

    bodgy Registered Member

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    I'm not so sure on that, it does make sense that you can't exclude files types from a sector based image. I'll have to delve into my FAT32 code and see if I can have it both ways.

    But then Acronis seems to indicate this is possible. This from a help file (not v10)

    Enter the exclusion criterion or select previously entered criterion from drop-down list.
    You can enter explicit file names for exclusion from the backup scope:
    file.ext - all such files will be excluded
    C:\file.ext (is true for file-level backups) - file.ext on the disk C file will be excluded. Please note, when creating a disk image the disk letters will be ignored.
    You can also use wild cards:
    *.ext - all files with .ext extension will be excluded
    C:\*.ext (is true for file-level backups) - files located in the root of partition C with .ext extension will be excluded. Please note, when creating a disk image the disk letters will be ignored.
    f_name.* - files of any extension and named f_name will be excluded
    ??name.ext - all files with .ext extension, having six letters in their names (starting with any two symbols (??) and ending with name ), will be excluded
     
  12. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    I don't know about TI but some imaging software can exclude files and folders from an image backup. Drive SnapShot certainly can. Even with NTFS. Maybe Ghost 2003 if it's a FAT32 partition.
     
  13. Beowulfnode

    Beowulfnode Registered Member

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    ahh $!%!&**!$@# now I'm going to have to check my backups :(
    lucky me.

    I'm thinking for the dynamic volumes that can't use the right click and "mount image'
    restore them to a temporary slave disk on my management terminal and have fun with:
    dir *.* /a/s/b/o:gne > filelist.txt
    on the live server and my terminal with a slave

    or have you been finding that the files are there but they are empty or something?
     
  14. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    We seem to haave lost Slaker who started this interesting thread.

    Any news on your problem or a resolution?
     
  15. slaker

    slaker Registered Member

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    I haven't been able to spend any more time with the issue since I last posted, unfortunately.

    My working assumption is that I'm dealing with some kind of bug in TrueImage. I can't duplicate the problem with a close approximation of my client's setup (I don't have a Dell SAS controller handy to make an exact dupe).
     
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