ATI 2010 Seems to Have Corrupted Our ATI 2009 Archive

I'm not completely sure why I'm posting this. The situation seems hopeless. Perhaps it's a way to express extreme disappointment that Acronis Support has not bothered to reply to the ticket that we submitted over three weeks ago. Maybe it'll spare someone else from the grief of data loss that we've suffered.

The full content of our support ticket follows, but to summarize:

• Upgraded our son's motherboard, CPU, and RAM for Christmas
• Switched from Windows XP 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit
• Installed ATI 2010 Trial to access our son's ATI 2009 archive
• When attempting to mount, ATI 2010 gave a "Cannot assign a drive letter..." message
• Searched Google regarding the problem and read a suggestion to mount in read/write mode, which worked
• Copied some files over to the Win 7 hard drive (the only bright spot in this story)
• Unmounted the archive and successfully ran a validation
• Several days later the archive reported as corrupt. All attempts to mount/explore/recover/validate fail, using two different builds of 2009 as well as 2010 build 6053.

Thanks for reading this far. We've researched and tried just about everything, but any suggestions are welcome.

If only I had known then what I know now. Painful lesson learned: Don't store data files solely in a proprietary, compressed format like Acronis.

[Case 00462743] Need Help with "Corrupt" Archive

Greetings,

We've been using True Image Home 2009 to make incremental backups of my son's entire Windows XP Pro hard drive. The backup drive is a Western Digital "My Passport" USB 500GB hard drive. It's formatted as FAT32 and has .tib files numbered from 1 - 50.

We upgraded some of his hardware last week and did a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit.

Before upgrading his computer and wiping the hard drive we successfully validated his True Image backup several times in Win XP. There were no problems with the archive.

After doing a fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit, we downloaded the Trial version of True Image Home 2010 from your Web site to check out the new features before upgrading. We attempted to mount the archive but received an odd warning, something about "Could not assign a drive letter...". We received that several times. We then chose the option to "Mount the backup in read/write mode", and that seemed to solve the problem. We copied a few files over and then unmounted it.

For safety's sake, we chose then to do another validation on the archive with the True Image Home 2010 Trial under the new Win 7 64-bit environment and it was successful.

Now, a few days later, we are receiving "The file is corrupt" messages, both when trying to mount the archive or when using Windows Explorer on it. This happens on my son's Windows 7 64-bit system and with my Windows XP Pro 32-bit system. It also happens when using the Linux recovery CD on either computer. We receive the "corrupt file" messages and cannot access the archive.

We've run "chkdsk" several times on the backup drive and there are no problems with the physical media.

How did an archive that validated successfully numerous times suddenly become "corrupt"? Did mounting it in read/write mode with the True Image Home 2010 Trial somehow break something? We wouldn't have tried that if we knew this was going to happen.

Please help. My son is devastated over the possible loss of his data. We don't need a full restore, we just need to access it one time to copy over some precious data and can then start over.

Is there a way to make True Image (with a command-line option or something) disregard errors in the checksum process and just open the archive to retrieve pieces of data? Even if parts of the data are flawed we can accept that. Or do you have any tools to work with "corrupted" .tib files? Are there any other Acronis products that can help us?

We are very patient and are willing to try any suggestions you may have. We're very hopeful that you can help us get our data back.

Thanks very much.