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Restored EXT4 drive misses data from 2nd partition in LVM2 group

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I have recently restored 320GB drive used by Fedora Linux from a True Image OEM build number 5128 backup.

Everything seemed to went fine as the system booted, data was present. Unfortunately, to my surprise, I found out that the 2nd partition in a LVM2 group was empty. There is no problem with the 1st partition in the group.

True Image claims the backup file is ok, as verification find no issues.

I would like to find out what is the problem. Was not the data of the 2nd partition fully backed up? Or maybe there was some issue on restore? Unfortunately I cannot mount the partition with the LVM2 group in Windows (due to the lack of support for the EXT4).

How could I find out what caused this issue?

best regards

Przemysław

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Przemyslaw,

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.

Version 19 of ATI equates to ATI 2016 for which the user guide shows the following supported file systems:

Supported file systems

Acronis True Image for home users supports:

  • FAT16/32
  • NTFS
  • Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 *
  • ReiserFS *

    Note: ReiserFS partitions and disks cannot be backed up to Acronis Cloud.

  • Linux SWAP *

* The Ext2/Ext3/Ext4, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP file systems are supported only for disk or partition backup/recovery operations. You cannot use Acronis True Image for file-level operations with these file systems (file backup, recovery, search, as well as image mounting and file recovering from images). You also cannot perform backups to disks or partitions with these file systems.

In addition, Acronis True Image Small Office supports:

  • ReFS ** (Supported in Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 only)

** Volume recovery without the volume resize capability

If a file system is not supported or is corrupted, Acronis True Image can copy data using a sector-by-sector approach.

I would suspect that LVM partitions would not be recognised and not included in the backup.  I cannot find any mention of support for LVM in any version of ATI or ACPHO - it is only mentioned in business versions of Acronis intended for use directly on Linux systems.

Dear Steve,

thank you for your reply.

The disk was backed up sector-by-sector. The thing is that in one and the same LVM2 group are 2 partitions and 1st of them was restored and 2nd was not.

Suppose that backup was performed in file-level mode. Then only the EXT4 partition would be backed up and none of the two in LVM2 group. It cannot be the case as one of the partitions in the LVM2 group was restored. It proves the backup was performed in sector-by-sector mode and keeps my question valid.

Sorry but file level backups cannot be performed of foreign file systems such as those from Linux systems, only disk backups.

Have you being doing a Disk level recovery or trying to do a Partition by Partition recovery from this backup? 

I would expect that if you have a sector-by-sector backup image, then this should be restored as a full disk recovery because Acronis may not correctly detect individual partitions due to the backup method used.

As I wrote - the backup was performed in sector-by-sector mode. It was restored on a disk level.

That is why I am surprised by missing data from the 2nd partition in LVM2 group. Note that the partition was restored, but empty.

Sorry but I don't think that I can help any further here as have no experience with LVM2 etc.

I do understand the frustration but Acronis True Image has never been expected to take anything more than a 'best efforts' approach with non Windows file systems.  This is a case where using a tool like Clonezilla would probably give more reliable results!

Can I convert TIB image to a raw IMG/BIN/etc. image that could be possibly accepted by other software? Would it be enough to strip a header (some N bytes)?

p.h. wrote:

Can I convert TIB image to a raw IMG/BIN/etc. image that could be possibly accepted by other software? Would it be enough to strip a header (some N bytes)?

Sorry but there are no tools available that I am aware of for this type of conversion.  The only option that Acronis have offered is to convert to VHD / VHDX (Windows image) files, which is done from the main ATI GUI running in Windows.