Backing up to multiple drives (NAS) from RAID
Is there a way to do it as separate archives per drive, not as a single spanned one across all of them, i.e. so each drive's TIB is independent of the others? I'm uneasy having a single 6-8TB TIB file spanned across drives, but having a backup seems smarter than duplicating to a 2nd RAID0 as a backup; and having it start a new TIB on each drive as it fills them, seems safer that having it spanned as one big one, less prone to errors.
And on a related note, if something DID go wrong, is it possible to recover files from a corrupted TIB, or one missing a span section, incremental file, etc? (that is, from the parts in the set AFTER the missing piece)
Are you are talking about spanned RAID? Or split backup files in the destination? Whatever, a volume, being it a dynamic volume or located on a hardware RAID - is backed up as a whole, it's impossible to back up some parts of underlying structure separately. You can set some split option so that resulting tibs will be limited to some size, but this is not less prone to error as loss of any .tib make the whole split chain unrecoverable. What you can do to make it less prone to failure is to split source data in several independent 'domains' (e.g. OS, database data, users' files , etc), and perform backup to several archives separately. You may set up exclusions or use file backup to back up folders independently.
Oh well, that scratches that idea, straight copy would make more sense in that case; I was just hoping that it could split the TIB and close it, once it got close to the destination drive being full, on a file boundary, and continue on the next drive with the rest, each drive's TIB being independent, but as a whole they'd restore the entire thing. I didn't think it was an option- and forgot that Acronis stores by sector and not file.
Recovery from a chain after missing incremental may be possible for file backups, but you'll have to send the backup to Acronis and wait quite a lot. For disk backups it is even less probable.
I figured as much -- it's disappointing, I've yet to find ANY backup program that's recoverable if any part of it gets corrupted; I lost a 200GB backup (single file) last year because of that, and Symantec said it was impossible too. You'd think, at least if it was an uncompressed backup, you'd be able to feed the TIB(s) to a file recovery program as a disk image or something, and recover things that way :(