Very Slow Validation - Please help

Max, welcome to these public User Forums.

First, sorry to read of your poor experience working with the Acronis Support people but your story is unfortunately not uncommon unless you can get your support case escalated to their more experienced 'expert' team. 

Personally, I would suggest not using validation, in particular, not using it as an option for every backup you are creating (by using this option in the Advanced settings page).

I have not used validation in that way for as far back as I can think across lots of different versions of ATI, and the current known issues with validation in ATI 2020 do nothing to pursuade me to change my mind about this feature.

The times when I have used validation have fallen into two categories:

• when I have needed to clean-up and reconcile the internal database after manually deleting unwanted backup files.  Superceded now by the 'Clean up versions' tool provided in ATI 2019 & later versions.
• when there was a question about any backup files possibly being damaged or corrupted.

Just to clarify, validation does not guarantee that the data in your backup file is free of any corruption or bad data etc.  Validation can only indicate that the file remains unchanged from the time when it was written to your backup storage location.  It does this by reading in the file from disk and recalculating the checksum values that are placed at intervals within the file to compare against the values stored within the file.  If the checksums match, the file is still as it was written.
If the actual backup task captured corrupted data from the disk, then that is what gets written to the backup file, and would be recovered back from it.

The only real test of the integrity of any backup would be to recover it to either the original drive or to another spare drive, though being able to open the (.tib or .tibx) file in Explorer and navigate around the contents can be a reasonable indicator too.

Max,

Agree with Steve on this.  You need to think differently about validation and when to use it.  Validation should be used sparingly with the understanding that it will be a long process.  Below are some quotes about validation from the User Guide:

Backup validation

The backup validation feature allows you to confirm that your data can be recovered. The program adds checksum values to the data blocks being backed up. During backup validation, Acronis True Image opens the backup file, recalculates the checksum values and compares those values with the stored ones. If all compared values match, the backup file is not corrupted.

4.5.9 Backup validation option

Location: Options> Advanced> Validation This option is not available for the backups that use Acronis Cloud as a backup destination.  

You can specify the following settings:

 

• Validate backup when it is created - Select to check the integrity of the backup version immediately after backup. We recommend that you enable this option when you back up your critical data or system disk.
• Validate backup regularly - Select to schedule validation of your backups to ensure that they remain "healthy".

 

The default settings are as follows:

 

• Frequency: once a month.
• Day: the date when the backup was started.
• Time: the moment of backup start plus 15 minutes.
• Advanced settings : the Run the validation only when the computer is idle check box is selected.

Example: You start a backup operation on July 15, at 12.00. The backup version is created at 12.05. Its validation will run at 12.15 if your computer is in the "screen saver" state at the moment. If not, then the validation will not run. In a month, August 15, at 12.15, the validation will start again. As before, your computer must be in the "screen saver" state. The same will occur on September 15, and so on.You can change the default settings and specify your own schedule. For more information see Scheduling(p. 54)

4.6.5  Validating backups

The validation procedure checks whether you will be able to recover data from a backup.For example, backup validation is important before you recover your system. If you start recovery from a corrupted backup, the process will fail and your computer may become unbootable. We recommend that you validate system partition backups under bootable media. Other backups may be validated in Windows. See also Preparing for recovery (p. 87) and Basic concepts (p. 29).  

Validating backups in Windows

1. Start Acronis True Image 2020, and then click Backup on the sidebar.
2. In the backup list, click the down arrow icon next to the backup to validate, and then click Validate.

Validating backups in a standalone version of Acronis True Image (bootable media)

To validate a specific backup version or an entire backup:

1. On the Recovery ab, find the backup that contains the version that you want to validate. If the backup is not listed, click Browse for backup, and then specify the path to the backup. Acronis True Image adds this backup to the list.
2. Right-click the backup or a specific version, and then click Validate Archive. This opens the Validate Wizard.
3. Click Proceed.   

5.1.1.2 Preparing for recovery

We recommend that you perform the following actions before recovery:

• Scan the computer for viruses if you suspect that the crash occurred due to a virus or malware attack.
• Under bootable media, try a test recovery to a spare hard drive, if you have one.

 

• Validate the image under bootable media. A backup that can be read during validation in Windows, may not always be readable in a Linux environment.

 

Under bootable media, there are two ways to validate a backup:

• To validate a backup manually, on the Recovery tab, right-click a backup and select Validate Archive.
• To validate a backup automatically before recovery, on the Options step of the Recovery Wizard, select the Validate backup archive before recovery check box.
• Assign unique names (labels) to all partitions on your hard drives. This will make finding the disk containing your backups easier.
• When you use the Acronis bootable media, it creates disk drive letters that might differ from the way Windows identifies drives. For example, the D: disk identified in the standalone Acronis True Image might correspond to the E: disk in Windows.

Validation

An operation that checks whether you will be able to recover data from a particular backup version(p. 192).

When you select for validation...

• a full backup version (p. 193) - the program validates the full backup version only.
• a differential backup version (p. 192) - the program validates the initial full backup version and the selected differential backup version.
• an incremental backup version (p. 193) - the program validates the initial full backup version, the selected incremental backup version, and the whole chain (if any) of backup versions to the selected incremental backup version. If the chain contains one or more differential backup versions, the program validates (in addition to the initial full backup version and the selected incremental backup version) only the most recent differential backup version in the chain and all subsequent incremental backup versions (if any) between the differential backup version and the selected incremental backup version.  

The following quote is taken from the Acronis Backup 12.5 User Guide.  I am including it as it describes the validation process in greater detail and explains why the process takes so long to run on backups which use the .tibx file format which TI 2020 has adopted for all newly created Full disk and partition images.  The last sentence, which I have italicized for clarification, of the quote which references ESXI and Hyper-V does not apply to TI 2020 .

5.11.5 Backup validation

Validation is an operation that checks the possibility of data recovery from a backup. When this option is enabled, each backup created by the backup plan is validated immediately after creation.

The preset is: Disabled.

Validation calculates a checksum for every data block that can be recovered from the backup. The only exception is validation of file-level backups that are located in the cloud storage. These backups are validated by checking consistency of the metadata saved in the backup.

Validation is a time-consuming process, even for an incremental or differential backup, which are small in size. This is because the operation validates not only the data physically contained in the backup, but all of the data recoverable by selecting the backup. This requires access to previously created backups.

While the successful validation means a high probability of successful recovery, it does not check all factors that influence the recovery process. If you back up the operating system, we recommend performing a test recovery under the bootable media to a spare hard drive or running a virtual machine from the backup (p. 239) in the ESXi or Hyper-V environment.

Thank you both very much for the responses and apologies for the delay in my reply. Things have been a little crazy lately (for us all). 

I'd just like to summarise what I've taken from your responses. Please let me know if I'm mistaken. 

1) Validation can be turned off or run very rarely. It doesn't actually indicate that the backup is working correctly just that the file remains unchanged. 

2) Being able to navigate the files from the .tibx file is a good indication the the backup is working ok. 

Those seem to be the main two points although there was lots of info in the second post and hence I may have missed some points. 

Moving forward, I'm going to change all my validations to being every other month. It seems like it's still a good thing to do but not very necessary and hence doesn't need to be done regularly. 

My only other question is that one drive in particular always fails the validation. This is mainly as the process takes so long that I force it to stop. Do you have any suggestions for this drive / scenario? It concerns me that I can't validate it at all. 

Thanks, 

Max

Max, you are correct in your summary of the two main points being made in this topic.

For myself, I do not have any scheduled validations at all and have never done so for as long as I have been using ATI, and without any obvious issues from not doing so that I am aware of.

For your one drive that always fails validation - what size of backup is involved for that drive?

Is this validation failure only happening for very large backup file sizes or for any files on that particular drive?

I would suggest considering if you can either split the size of large backups, i.e. make separate tasks for specific types of data such as images etc.

Thanks for the reply Steve. Glad to hear I've got it right. 

The drive failing is backing up roughly 2.2TB of data. I backup the entire drive, I don't separate things out on any of my drives as that would make things quite complex (I have 4 internal HDDs). As such it's validating a backup for the entire drive. This was never an issue on the old ATI. 

Perhaps the only solution, as said, is to turn off all validations. 

Max, check your backup task options on the Schedule page > Advanced to ensure that you have selected to prevent the computer from going to sleep while the task is active - this should apply to validation too.

Also, check your Power options, in particular, that you do not have USB selective suspend active which can allow the backup drive to 'drop off' during quiet periods of the validation task.

Hi Steve, 

Thanks for the reply. The first one was already set but the Power option was set to "Enabled", I've disabled this and will see if that makes a difference in the future. 

Thanks again.

Max, I've noticed the same thing -- the backups run quickly, but validation takes forever. This wasn't a problem in previous versions of True Image.

I've set the option to validate backups after creation. I think it's important. Backup validation is a canary in the coal mine; it catches media errors, and it uses a lot of memory, so it catches memory errors as well. If you're seeing consistent validation failures, you might consider downloading something like Memtest86+, booting to it, and letting it do its thing overnight.

Previous versions of True Image would log detailed information about when the backup started, when validation started, and when it all finished. If anyone can help me figure out how to do that in True Image 2020, I'd be grateful.

Louis, validation in ATI 2020 will scan all version chains for your backup task, not just the most recent chain, which is being reversed in the next ATI version for 2021 to allow the user to decide what to validate.  It is this scan of all chains that makes validation so much longer to run!

The logs should still show when the backup finished and when other actions start but there are now two different logs to look in, depending on the type of backup task.

For Files & Folders using .tib files, it is still the ti_demon logs but for Disk backups using .tibx files, the logs are now backup_worker logs that hold all the detailed messages.

All logs are still found at C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs but in separate folders named for the type.

Thanks for your detailed explanation, Steve!!!
 

Ever since I upgraded from ATI 2014 to ATI 2020 earlier this year I had been having the same problem that Max described.  Validation of a full back up would take ~20 hrs.  The next day when ATI did an incremental backup, validation of the incremental backup would almost always fail and ATI would then start a new incremental backup.  I've configured it to create a new Full Backup after 6 Incremental Backups (see screenshot below).  So more often than not ATI would create 6 new Incremental backups in a night since validation of each one of them would fail.  More often than not, validation of a full backup would be successful.

Prior to upgrading to ATI 2020 I never had this issue. 

However, based on your explanation of validation, I will now turn it off.  Thanks again for the explanation.

Hello!

I had been using TI2016 for years, had purchased TI2017 with license for 5 boxes but never made use of it.  I finally upgraded 2016 to 2017 and lost NAS recognition but that is another topic.  

I am in this thread because I then bought 2021 license upgrade Tues 1/26/2021 (NAS seen in network but not under NAS - another topic again)

A backup to NAS starting Tues 1/26 went ok with validation turned on for original backup.  An 871 GB backup took maybe 20 hrs... The validation stage Wed 1/27 initially showed ~20 hrs - 24+ hours later Thurs afternoon on 1/28  it is showing 17 hrs 39 minutes remaining.  At this rate the validation will be done in 6? days?  What makes this SO SLOW????

I read all entries above.  I plan on using this backup to restore to a new SSD. The user guide recommends (p139) using the backup and recovery method.  It also recommends validating the backup.  Since this backup is a fresh copy, I was planning on using the freshly validated backup but waiting for this is REALLY PAINFUL!!

Thanks for any help here....  What should I expect for this validation?  I see a pile of logs but don't really know which to use to forward, if you want to take a look.

tkent

ATI 2020 and 2021 used the "new" *.tibx architecture for Disk and Partitions backup tasks. This architecture uses a new, more comprehensive (?) validation process, which takes much longer to complete. You backup is relatively large (871 GB) so it will take quite a while to validate - this will in part depend on how powerful the SoC on the NAS is - my NAS has a anemic ARM processor so it takes quite a while.

The first thing to do is to make sure you have not defaulted to full validation after each backup is run, at most select the option to only validate the latest backup. You can manually run a full backup if you wish. 

Ian

Thanks for the quick response - its still chugging away.  I guess I just have to wait and let it finish.

tkent

Just did...full backup took about 45min.  validation been working almost 31/2 hours and suddenly the TI screen greyed out..Tried to stop and got the wait for program to continue or force to stop after i waited a half hour I hit the force to stop.  Machine did a restart and when I opened up TI again now I get a big red X in the middle of the main page and a smaller one on the side that shows my SSD drive on the left side. Cant get the options button to do anything, only one that I can get to do something is the Activity on the top and now I've get a circle thats been going round and round for the last half hour.  Is there any solution for me???

Sorry for hijacking someone else's thread. 

Hope someone like Steve Smith reads this, He has helped me before and maybe he can help again.

Billy, my first suggestion / recommendation would be to forget about doing validation at the same time as doing your Backups, i.e. not within the same operation.  In all honesty, I have never used Backup + Validation in any of the versions of ATI I have used, partially because of the extra time this has needed but also simply because I do not believe that it adds any real value and doesn't guarantee that the backup will be good for recovery at a later time!

Next, assuming you are still seeing the same issue as described above, i.e. the spinning circle when attempting to do something with your backup task, then there are some actions you need to take:

1. Download the Acronis Scheduler Manager (stand-alone) tool, launch this (schedmgr.exe) and then enter the command: task zap in the black command panel shown.  This will remove all current scheduled tasks for ATI on your PC.
    
2. Restart the PC to clear any hanging ATI processes, then after launching ATI again, turn off Acronis Active Protection before attempting to open the Options of your problem backup task.
    
3. If you are able to open the Options, then remove the Validation option in the Advanced settings page.
    
4. If you get back to a spinning circle situation again, then restart the PC again, then try to Remove the backup task settings by using the Delete option for the task in the Backup task menu (click on the caret 'v' to the right of the task name), but select to only remove the settings, leaving the files intact.
   Once the task has been removed, then use the 'Add existing backup' option to select the most recent backup file again, which will add back the task, after which you need to Reconfigure the task settings & schedule.

When it kicks off validation it sets the priority to below normal.  One thing that might help is to launch Task Manager, sort by disk activity to bring the ATI process doing the validation to the top (it is a service so it would normally be down in the weeds).  Right-click on the process and select Go To Details.  That should take you to TrueImageHomeService.exe (in ATI 2019 anyhow, which isn't any faster than 2020 because 2.7 TB validation takes over 2 days without doing this).  Right-click on that executable and select set priority.  Change it to something higher.  I go with realtime because it still won't be using more than 1% of CPU (at least on a 12 core processor).  The time remainin will still be 2 days, but after an hour it will knock a few hours off.

BTW, I only update Acronis when I need to move the OS from one drive to another.  I have never had a backup program successfully do a full restore.  Starting with MS Backup in the '90s.  We all know what MS does when it experiences and error, it says f*ck you and terminates (MS programmers are forever the idiots).  I still remember that like yesterday.  At least it would tell which file it errored on, but left you with nothing restored.  So you would have to kick the restore off again excluding that file...only to have it error out on another file.  Never leaving you with anything restored so it literally ran for hours before croaking on the next file.It took me months to restore my data because each time it took longer before it would croak on another file. 

Backup software is SH*T, and reviewers generally write their reviews without doing a large backup, restore and Duplicate Cleaner 4 with SHA-512 or byte-to-byte comparison to the original, several times.  They seem to only be concerned whether it will say it has done a backup.