Skip to main content

Acronis True Image and bad sectors on HDD

Thread needs solution

Hello! I plan to buy Acronis True Image 2019 for creating backup on my home PC. I plan to use incremental backup from main HDD to external HDD. But I wonder what will happen if I will make backup and then after some time my main HDD will gave broken sectors and some files becomes unreadable? What will happen if I will run incremental backup after sectors become bad? Will acronis warning me somehow about that or I will get unreadable files in backup too?

Sorry for my English, it's not my first language and thank everybody for answers!

0 Users found this helpful

Welcome to these public User Forums.

Acronis True Image (ATI) is designed to help users recover from situation where a disk drive goes bad or fails and will give warning messages when such issues are encountered.

The key to any backup software is to use it before the disk drive becomes bad so that you have the ability to recover to a point where the errors are not present or have not caused any serious issues for your data or applications.

ATI provides a number of different Backup Schemes, including one for creating Incremental backup files, but I would recommend staying with the default scheme which would create a new Full backup after creating 5 or 6 Incremental files, and then keeping a minimum of 2 such 'version chains'.  Ideally, if your data is important to you, you should make several different backups of the same data and store these in different places, to avoid a single point of potential loss.

Steve is correct - multiple backups, time frames and schemes (located in different locations on different media) provide many different opportunities to try and recover from.  Industry standard is AT LEAST 3-2-1. Minimum of 3 copies of the data, at least 2 of those are backups and at least 1 of them is stored offsite (or at the very least, different storage mediums).

Once data on a disk is corrupted it's a crap shoot.  If a disk starts to fail (bad sectors), the data on those sectors can become corrupted.  If they are corrupted on the original source disk, at the time of backup, you're still just backing up the same corrupted data. In some cases, it's not so bad and can be repaired (chkdsk, sfc /scannow, dism OS repair commands).  However, in other instances, if you don't have an older copy (archive or previous backup) before the corruption occurred, then you might be out of luck - this goes for any backup tool.