A view Questions about the Archive Format
Hello!
I am currently thinking of replacing some of my backups with Archives
My Current Backups are daily incremental rsync jobs onto a mirror, which gives me the possibility to switch to the Mirror in case something goes wrong.
However this is pretty expensive since my Mirror needs to have the same capacity as my Main System. This isnt really worth for certain files (especially the ones that dont change like .mkv and my old Photos). So the Plan is to turn some of my "hot" backups into cold storage that just sits on a shelf, so i can recover in terms of a failure but dont have to buy ever bigger and bigger Backup systems.
My first idea was to just copy the files over and call it a day, that however makes verifying rather inefficient and its also pretty slow for a larger file counts. My next idea was to use rar and add 1 or 2 percent of parity information (just in case), since rar has build in checksum verifying would be a lot quicker. Problem is, have you ever tried to open a rar file containing 100k+ files? Apparently those archives have no lockup table and need to check for files... Takes forever. An alternative would be to use other archive containers and manually ad .par2 files.
During my research i stumbled over True Image and its archive function. Unfortunately i wasnt able to source any information on how those archive work in terms of file specs. Do they archive Checksums along with the files? How long does it take to open archives containing lots of smaller files? Is there an easy way to verify file integrity? Can i create archives without having True Image delete my original Files? (I could just run it on my backup system tho, which would solve that problem).
I thank everybody in advance for your time reading this and would greatly appreciate any information you can provide :)
This video explains it pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlBtPWLgx2I&list=PLJbh8iM59BMc113pmmk02PtX82ZpeFPXa&index=12
I personally haven't used the feature. My concern is that an archive is not backed up so is still open to data loss, just like other files stored elsewhere. Essentially, this is just moving files from one location to another, but in a proprietary format.
You could do this with Windows native robocopy or xcopy commands and create your own running log with the right parameter switches. But, if the data is truly important, a backup is still needed (in my opinion), regardless if you use Acronis archive or something else. When there's only one copy of the data, if it gets corrupted or the media becomes lost, stolen or damaged, it's gone.
I have already taken a look at the documentation, but as with most consumer products its pretty underwhelming. The only Question this answers is my first one, because it looks like there is no way to prevent my original Files from being deleted (apart from mounting the volume as read only, which actually did work for me).
I think ill take Steve Smiths advise and contact the pre-sale team for my more technical Questions and report back here if i get a useful answer :)
I only intend to replace my Backup with an archive to save Storage costs for certain files. Im not going to delete my Original Files on my Main system, so i will still have the same two copies of my files, just on cheaper storage :)
Given that you want to retain your original files, then perhaps you should be looking at the Synchronisation feature of ATI instead of at Archiving.