Restore from incomplete backup
Hello All & thanks in advance for everyone's interest & help. I have a problem. I recently bought True image 2016 as I was tired of struggling with Microsofts's generic backup problems. I have quite a few image files to protect. I have a 1.5 tb internal drive with a 2 tb external Seagate drive which held more images. This was all backed up on a 3 tb Seagate external. I appeared to have about 2.6 tb total on the 2 drives to protect with Windows showing 2.72 tb available. Problem was I had to delete my existing backups to make space for my new Acronis backups so went ahead & did that-cleared off the 3 tb drive. The initial backup for the internal drive went fine & it appears to be ready to resore if needed. But during the backup of the 2 tb external I saw signs that the drive was failing. But I let it run as I didn't see any advantage to terminating the backup. It took a very long time, many hours, but I finally got a message that there wasn't enough space on the 3 tb drive to finish the backup & to plug in another drive, even though Windows showed 110Gb still available. I did plug in yet another 1 tb drive that I use to backup another computer. It put 150 gb on this drive until finally the drive that was failing just gave out. It just couldn't do much more.
So I now have about 1.5 tb of data but I don't know how to access it. I should add that I have been able to go back into the failed drive & coax out some files. They are coming off intact & usable. But that procedure seems to have run it's course. I worked at it all afternoon today & got 4 files. So if I'm going to salvage these images I need to get into this backup file. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks again
Thanks Bobbo for the quick reply.
I want to review the problem quickly to be sure I've described it correctly. I have an incomplete backup on a fully functional 3 tb drive. The failed drive had given us, just with copy & paste, quite a few intact files which leads me to think that the incomplete backup has good files. But I can't access them. My 3 tb drive contains a 1.5 tb .tib file. When I double click it I get this message: "An error occurred while opening the backup archive. Cannot continue the operation because the backup is corrupted, or is being used by another process, or you do not have enough permissions to perform the operation." I did try the right click tib/True Image/mount route & got a similar rejection.
I'm not surprised at this because the backup process was grinding to a halt due to the drive failure & apparently the 3tb drive was not big enough. But there is 1.5 tb in files on there. Is there any way to get around the normal gateway to this tib file?
Thanks again.
Pkk
I'm not sure you are going to have any luck with this. I believe the mount process depends on a coplete file from which to work. What you might try is to boot a machine with the Recovery Media with the drive attached and attempt a sector by sector restore on the backup file to another drive.
Ditto to Enchantec's post. You might have luck with a sector by sector recovery using the offline media, but it's going to be a crap-shoot. Most likely if the backup did not complete successfully though, it's probaby not going to happen. Do you have any earlier backup versions to try and at least recover files to an earlier point in time?
Unfortunatly no there are no earlier backups, as I deleted them to make room for this new Acronis backup. I'll follow instructions on how to get a sector by sector backup going. My knowledge on this is already maxed out. I guess I was hoping someone had a tool to get into this file without a complete backup, given the way these big hard drives have a way of loosing sectors. What happens if the sector holding the final part of the backup fails? The whole thing is lost?
Thanks again.
Pkk
I haven't run into any issues with someone not being able to get into a working backup that completed successfully. I think the problem is that if the session does not close out completely for the backup, that's where the trouble normally lies. But, if you have a corrupt/failing hard drive, there's always the possibility that data on it can be damaged and having a large single backup file could potentially be a higher risk, but probably not in most cases. If the disk is usable, running chkdsk should be sufficient to mark the sector as bad and remap it so that the existing backup file should be OK if there are issues reading the content on the disk. I'd recommend the 3-2-1 backup approach to have some redundancy as a fallback, just in case.
My bet is that the Recovery Media will by default restore the backup file if at all possible in sector by sector mode. Give it a shot and see what happens.