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Does Acronis TI 2020 support highly fault-tolerant backup to DVD's (like RAID-5)?

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DVD's are known to develop faults after a while. You could backup twice but chances are both copies will get corrupted eventually. Thankfully it is not an entire DVD that goes corrupted, but just random small parts of it. Does TI 2020 support something like RAID-5 on DVD's so with parity and redundancy it will recover data even from highly corrupted DVD's?

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E B, welcome to these public User Forums.

I have not seen anything in any of the Acronis documentation related to using any form of RAID with any optical media discs.

ATI will allow backups to be made to DVD media but as you have already mentioned, this comes with risks and re-writeable DVD media should not be used / is not recommended!

Given the low cost of larger HDD media or even SSD's, these are most commonly used for backups and do support use in RAID array configurations.

I agree with Steve, given the low cost of HDDs, particularly UB3 HDD, it is hard to see why you would back up to DVD or Blu-ray. I think the last time I did that was during beta testing of ATI 2017 or 2018 - backup to Blu-ray. If you want redundancy such as that with RAID5 you probably need to look at a NAS. There are also multi-drive USB cases that support RAID, but not sure if they support RAID 5.

Ian

Left in a drawer, what develops a fault first, cheap usb flash memory or usb rotational hard drives?

"re-writeable DVD media should not be used"

 

Just noticed you said re-writable, did you mean that DVD-RW should not be used but DVD-R and DVD are ok?

Ethan, please ignore my comment about DVD-RW media - I had that in the back of my mind from somewhere, probably my own poor experiences in using such media a long time ago.

The definitive statement on what can be used is given in the ATI 2020 User Guide:

Supported storage media

  • Hard disk drives (HDD)*
  • Solid State Drives (SSD)
  • Networked storage devices
  • FTP servers**
  • CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R (including double-layer DVD+R), DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, BD-R, BD-RE
  • USB 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.0, eSATA, FireWire (IEEE-1394), SCSI, and PC card storage devices

* Limitations on operations with dynamic disks:

  • Creation of Acronis Secure Zone on dynamic disks is not supported.
  • Recovery of a dynamic volume as a dynamic volume with manual resizing is not supported.
  • Try&Decide® cannot be used for protecting dynamic disks.
  • "Clone disk" operation is not supported for dynamic disks.

Do you think it sounds good as a feature request for ALL backup media? As in, 50% or 10% of the size of each backup becomes redundancy sums to survive substantial media damage? A related product is doing it already:

http://quickpar.org.uk/VerifyingAndRepairing.htm

Ethan, sorry but you are comparing apples with oranges with the QuickPar tool and Acronis.

Acronis already takes every measure possible to avoid damage or corruption but cannot do anything about poor media quality or failing devices used for storage.

When ATI write backup archive data to any storage device it embeds checksum data for each block of data being written, such that every archive has a large number of such checksum values which are then later used by the Validation process to determine that the archive remains unchanged from when written.

What I am saying is just make the checksums bigger and distant from the data. Ever seen what ATI does if a single block gets corrupted? Does it attempt to work out the data from the checksum/s?

Ethan, this is a user forum and I and the other MVP's are just experienced users like yourself.  We have no influence on the design of Acronis products or even access to the details of those designs.  You need to open a Support case direct with Acronis if you want to get answers to your questions in that area.