Validations are taking forever

Bernie,

A validation takes about the same time as the time it took the entire chain of backups to be produced, plus some. When you validate an incremental backup, the full backup, all the incremental backups up to the last backup included are validated.

Validation across a network can be iffy because of network/hardware performance

Also note that some networks are designed to throttle down requests for lots of bandwidth, so small stuff goes quickly but large stuff can take disproportiantely longer.

Ah, thanks for the info! My old backup program had two different kinds of verify: one did a byte-by-byte verification of the backup and the other *just* checked that the backup file, itself, wasn't corrupted [I dunno - they probably had a checksum on it or something]. I'd always used the latter [which took pretty much no time at all]. Now it is clear [and also why there's an option to only validate once in a while rather than with every backup!]. so mystery solved, pretty much.

Is there much reason to validate at all? I'm not backing up to something like burned-DVDs or the like, and in having down thousands of backups to HD I've never had an error. I guess disk errors can happen, though so it probably does make sense to spot-check validate occasionally -- so I changed it to validate once a week and I'll see how that goes. THANKS!

Probalby is overkill to do it all the time. I certainly don't but do spot check once in a while and I maintain a lot of backups so if one is bad, it isn't to costly. Of course, this is once you have confirmed that ati backing up and restoring will work on your machine.

Validation only reads the backup file(s) and recomputes the checksums and compares them to the original checksums embedded in the backup file during its creation -- if check sums are the same, fine; if not, then declares file invalid. so it realy only detects whether a file has been changed (corrupted) since it was created. Since you can keep changing what's onthe disk while you are backing up, you can rely validation by comparing to the original data.

If I am reading your backup name correctly, does it have 100 files on the chain? Validation involves all the backup files in the chain. The more files, the longer it takes.

The more incremental files on the chain, the more at risk your backup files become When restoring an incremental backup, all prior files are needed and used starting with the selected date and plus all prior files. If any one of the prior files cannot be read, any file after the bad one becomes of no value.

f incremental is your preferred type, it is safer to create a new full backup file after just a few incrementals rather than an extended number of incrementals. If you use the backup scheme to keep x number of recent version chains, this method provides for automatic cleanup of older backup schemes. This is one example but change the 6 and 4 to fit your needs.

A few things: I still don't exactly understand why validation takes so long, but I do have it only set to do once a week now. On the chain: I have the backups set to do only 5 incrementals per chain and as things stand now I have a full and two incrementals since I nuked the old backup scheme and set up a new one (as per your recommendation a few days ago). The "0100" is the time: I have backups set to run at 1AM and my file name is _@date_@time. I also have "store no more than 4 chains" set and so some time toward the end of March I'll see what that does.

One thing: can a validation run *while* a backup is running? I have my backups set for 1AM. I figured I'd just as soon have the validations kind of out of my way so instead of doing the weekly validation at 2PM, I'm starting it at 11PM. If it takes the 4+ hrs that it seems to, then it'll finish at around 4AM -- neatly overlapping my daily 1AM backup. Will that be a problem? Should I reschedule the validation so it is guaranteed NOT to hit a backup?

Thanks! /b\

Only one acronis task can run and any others will be delayed. I would suggest that you have change the start time so only 1 start is set to start at the same time. Each job will run after the prior job gets finished.

My suggestion is that you include validation as part of each task and not run a separate validation. Check the validation setting on each task only run immediately after backup--would be my recommendation unless you have reason for the other settings.
The backup name should be _@date@_@time@_ if you want the program to supply the date and time.

Interesting -- my only problem with validating every time is that, as I've already experienced, it'll make my backups take a _long_ time. My incremental this AM took just four minutes, instead of nearly five hours the other day. [and my full backups will run to nearly nine hours]. so my only reason for other settings would be to keep the backup times shorter.

I don't have a good feel for how important validataions are. I know back in the very old days when I backed up to floppies [!] verifying the backup was pretty important [and even then the floppy might not be readable when you needed it], but since I've been backing up to HDs I've never seen a problem with the "integrity" of a backup. Do you really recommend validating every backup?

I recommend not validating every backup -- I think ift borders on compulsive ;) . If you have a systematic problem with backups becoming corrupted, doing a validation (i.e., recomputing the checksums) will not be of much use. Basically, if you can comfirm that ati can backup and restore on your hardware, then you don't need to validate every time -- just once and a while to put your mind at ease. Validation takes just way too long for so little that it gives you.

Ime, the most common reason for an invalid backup is that the backup did not complete but ati closed the incomplete backup file instead of deleting it -- this has been more of a problem with the last two versons than prior ati versions. If this is happening (easily spotted because the bad backups are much shorter than the rest), you need to track down the problem causing incomplete backups, not run more validations. Since ATI11 (that's ati11 , ati2011), you pretty much have to check backups visually using explorer if you want to be sure they were created and completed -- the file management/task management function isn't reliable enough in the newer versions. I do recommend that you frequently visually inspect the backup directories to confirm that backups are being made and are not undersized.

Due to the extended backup time, I can understand why you might not want to validate every time but it is important that you do validate occasionally. The purpose of validation is to find a bad write. If a file has a bad write and not checked, any backup after that is worthless. I can't tell you what is right for you as it is your call. If you have static data, perhaps it could be moved to another disk to help shorten the backup time.

Other than scheduling, any edits to an existing task can cause unpredictable results. Always best to start a new task if changing any of the parameters.