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Continue differential backup to another computer

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I have an external usb hdd and i created a differential backup of this disk with Acronis on a Windows 7 pc

Yesterday i wanted to continue the differential backup but the disk is not readable anymore by Windows.

However when i insert the disk on a mac it seems to be working!

Can i continue the differential back up with  Acronis which is installed on the mac or the backup will be full?

 

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lamousis, welcome to these user forums.

How is your external USB HDD drive formatted?  This may explain why the drive looks fine on your Mac but not on your PC?

A differential backup can only be continued on the same system where it was originally created.  You Mac does a different type of backup than you have on Windows and only uses a single backup .TIB file for all backups.

It's NTFS formatted! and it's weird that it looks ok on the mac but not on Windows!

So to continue the differential backup i have to make Windows read the drive!

Thanks!!

 

What error do you get when you attach this drive to your Windows computer?

What does it show in Windows Disk Management for the drive?
Does it get a drive letter?

What version of Windows OS is being run here?

What is the capacity of the USB drive?

Please post some screen shots if possible.

I get a drive letter and the error is "drive is not formatted"

The capacity is 3TB and the OS version is Windows 7 64-bit service pack 1

In Windows Disk Managment the drive is there (it says "healthy") but with no file system and 100% free space

I'm running a chkdsk (which so far shows a lot of bad sectors)

I've seen this error before and after the chkdsk the drive worked ok! Hope it does and this time!

Something isn't right. A Mac can read NTFS but can't write to NTFS. It's possible the Mac changed the permissions of the drive somehow, but don't know how.

attach the drive to windows. Right click the drive letter and properties... advanced... ownership. Give EVERYON ownership. Once done, give all users, everyone and administratirs full access under the permissions tab. You should now be able to read/write on the entire drivefrom this machine again and from other Windows machines too.

you cannot mix and match Windows and Mac tibs. Use Mac created tibs on the Mac and Windows created tibs on Windows. If you want to be able to use this drive on both systems, you need to format it as FAT32. Formatting will wipe everything, so backup or save first if you need too. FAT33 also has a 4gb single file size limitation. Your backup files will be broken up into 4gb pieces as needed.

You may need to look at your drive manufacturers support site and download / use any tools they offer that can check the whole drive for bad sectors if you are seeing these regularly - it sounds like the drive is starting to go bad perhaps?

Hard Disk Sentinel may also help give you a better understanding of the potential life span of the drive.

Hope the chkdsk solves the issue for you. You may want to try the free trial of hard disk sentinel to see what value it shows your drives health to be. It will provide the remaining life via percentage and the estimated remaining time frame. It it's yellow or red, time to consider replacing.

I haven't tried the permissions! I'll do it after the chksdsk ends!

I'll also try Hard Disk Sentinel!

The drive is dying anyway so i wanted to have a final backup before it completely stops working

Thanks!!!

Which drive is dying here?  Is this the external USB drive you are trying to backup to or a different drive?

If it is the external USB drive, then you put any backup written to that drive at risk if you know it is dying!

OK, thank you for the clarification, I hadn't picked up that you were backing up this external drive.

Have you tried just copying the files from the external drive to another location, as that way if you hit any bad sectors, you will at least know what file(s) are affected by which files cannot be copied?

It's possible your drive has developed bad sectors at the beginning of the drive where the formatting info is saved. Just a guess on my part. Data recovery software might be your best bet. The more you use the drive to try to back it up, the more chance you have of doing further damage and loosing more data. If you have incemental tib files on this drive that are damaged, you can't save them. Any data that came after the damaged incremental will be lost.

chkdsk didn't finish! the reason was "an unspecified error occurred 696e647863686b2e"....

WD diagnostics failed also...

On the disk properties there is no security tab, so i can't see or change the permissions

I used hard disk sentinel and the estimated time remaining of the drive is 17 days!!!

The weird thing is that it works fine on the mac!!! So i copied the latest files of the drive (the ones that i have written after the first differential backup) to another location.

I'll use hard disk sentinel as a final effort in case the drive can be "saved" somehow, although it seems it's coming to an end.

I can't understand why mac doesn't have a problem reading the drive and windows have!!!

Thanks for all the replies!

lamousis, if the disk is dying then I would suggest cutting your losses and replacing it.  Alternatively, see if you can do some form of low level format of the drive using any utility programs that WD provide.

None of this can explain why Mac sees the drive OK but Windows doesn't but that is probably down to the differences in the OS's and how filesystems are handled as much as anything else.

Yikes - yeah, if it's saying you have 17 days, it sounds like the disk is in bad shape - it's an estimate of course, but It's a pretty good one for overall drive health.  It's one of the main reasons I purchased it, just because I've had a few drives die on me out of the blue, thinking they were just fine, when they really weren't. 

Like Steve, I'd probably cut my losses with that drive - worth the old college try, but if it's just not working, you're probalby just spinning your wheels unless you spend $$$ to let the pro's migrate it another disk.