Corrupted my incremental chain--why???
When I needed a backup just yesterday, I had coincidentally validated my incremental daily backup, back to the Sunday full backup, and the Recovery operation worked. Yay.
Today I thought: "my daily backups are on a separate drive internal to my computer, I should have another backup on my NAS" and so I did the following as a test:
1. Copied this weeks' 5 .tib files to the NAS
2. Opened ATI2020 and went to Add Backup and selected the files on the NAS
3. Upon doing so, my original backup is now corrupted!!!?!!!
So while I thought I might be able to do a backup to one location, and then copy it to another location (instead of doing another ATI time-consuming backup) this not only did not work, it corrupted the original's database somehow. As if Add Backup saw the files as identical to a backup I already had and overwrote the original backup task.
Where did I go wrong. Can the damage be repaired?
The attached pic shows 3 files as Missing, and of course they are most certainly there, having not been touched other to have copied those to my NAS.
I fixed it myself--I simply did a "Clone Settings" of the corrupted backup task, then I Removed the corrupt backup task from the list, and Renamed the clone to the original.
It seems that trying to do an Add Backup of a backup that is named identically to an existing one is a serious no-no.
TomF wrote:................
It seems that trying to do an Add Backup of a backup that is named identically to an existing one is a serious no-no.
Yes, definitely a no-no; the data base will not allow that to happen.
Glad that you managed to sort it out.
Ian
Thank you Ian, I am pleased this morning to see that my Sunday Full plus Daily Incremental backups did today pick-up with a new incremental day, and to be certain I did a Validate on this morning's incremental and it all works.
I do wonder if I can copy-out to my NAS an entire "set", then Rename them to something different, then do an Add Backup of the renamed set to ATI? Something to try another day...
BTW my "Clone Settings" to make a new Backup Task to replace the corrupted one actually did not work--I had to re-create all the settings from the original. But happily as I said this new Task worked with the existing backup sets.
Epilog: My daily backups are to an Internal mSATA SSD in my laptop, and I wanted to keep a copy of these backups on an external drive as well. It turns-out first of all that to do so on a NAS is problematic for me because the Acronis .iso that I boot from in an emergency does not apparently have a driver to see my Ethernet connection. So my "external drive" will be a USB instead.
So I've copied my Daily incremental backups to my external USB drive, then re-booted to my AcronisTrueImage2020_38600.iso thereon, and the .tib chain on the USB drive validated. It works.
In the end I realized that having the ATI desktop application "know about" my USB copy(ies) was actually going to be of no help to me at all.
For as long as I've owned ATI software, I've never used it quite enough to actually get good at it!!!!
:blush:
TomF wrote:......
I do wonder if I can copy-out to my NAS an entire "set", then Rename them to something different, then do an Add Backup of the renamed set to ATI? Something to try another day...
I would think that renaming the files will make the backup unusable (assuming it uses the *,tibx architecture); You would also need to change any references to earlier backup files in subsequent backup files, as well as "master record" in the first backup file.
NAS is problematic for me because the Acronis .iso that I boot from in an emergency does not apparently have a driver to see my Ethernet connection.
What sort of recovery media are you using? If you use Windows RE it should pick up all the drivers in your current Windows installation.
Ian
Hi Ian, my laptop's boot method is not UEFI and I use EasyBCD from Neosmart Technologies to present me with a selection screen on boot, one that enables me to boot directly to any number of alternates to my W7Pro, including ATI .iso files that may be on any number of drives. So I'm limited to whatever is on the .iso e.g. latest AcronisTrueImage2020_38600.iso.
I think for the time being I am simply going to ask my Backup task Options to make a copy, once the daily backup to my internal mSATA is complete, to my external USB 2TB drive which I will leave always connected. At least, that is what I THINK it will do, I mean under Disk backup options > Advanced > Backup reserve copy.
I just did this and will wait to see if tomorrow's 800a backup does what I want. I only noticed this today when poking-around the Advanced page.
Tom, be careful with using the backup reserve copy option - this is only valid for disk backups from prior to ATI 2020, not for any using .tibx files! Also it only works on full backup files!
Backup reserve copy
Location: Options > Advanced > Backup reserve copy
This option is not available for the backups that use Acronis Cloud as a backup destination and for local backups created by Acronis True Image 2020 or later.
Backup reserve copy is an independent full backup version created immediately after a normal backup. Even when you create an incremental or differential backup version containing only data changes, the reserve copy will contain all the data selected for the normal backup. You can save reserve copies of your backups on the file system, a network drive, or a USB flash drive.
In terms of backup efficiency, then it would be better to just add an extra new backup task to your second / external drive and run that rather than using the reserve copy option, that way you will get the benefits of faster & smaller incremental backups. I do this for my own system and with .tibx files now auto consolidating incremental, I now use larger number of incremental because the risk of damage or corruption to an individual _inc_ file is much lower due to the consolidation with the full .tibx file.
You can still use EasyBCD with UEFI boot systems but will see a warning when launched that some options are not available! I use it myself but with .WIM files rather than with .ISO to have additional options at boot time.
Steve, thanks I did not see a ? (help icon) for the Reserve copy option and so just thought it might do what I wanted. I will deselect it then, I only really want to do a Daily incremental backup one time, and then copy that backup over to my external USB drive since I've found that such does work when booting to .iso and Recovering "offline" from Windows.
I will probably use my Syncback program to copy the .tib files automatically (yes I still use .tib and not .tibx) from my internal mSATA to my external USB drive after the ATI backup has been made. Rather than manually using Explorer.
Thanks for the mention re: EasyBCD. The last time I visited their support forum it had suggested to me somehow that I not bother to try to get it to work...