Hard Drive Crashed - Hope Acronis Works - First Restore Any Suggestions

First, I recommend that you crack open the documentation and spend some time in the Recovery section for disks and partitions so that you can familiarise yourself with the process.

Second, I advise strongly that you perform the recovery using recovery media which you the user must create.  True Image provides a tool for doing this which you will find in the documentation as well.

Post back with any questions. 

Thank you for the information.  I will check thru the documentation.  But I guess its not as simply as essentially unzipping the .tib file (like a zip file) & then it all shows back up?  The drive that crashed was not the system drive, so it was essentially just the drive with all my files, but the computer itself is running fine.

And one more thing to complicate this issue.  My drive that crashed was "G".  When I connected a new hard drive today it became "G".  So while I was away, my backup ran same time every night as it does & backed up the new "G".  So now I have a full backup of my correct "G" drive, 3 incremental backups of "G" drive & then the latest in the string is of the wrong "G" drive.  But when I go into acronis on the recovery tab, it only shows today's date & not the other dates.  How can I access the correct files now?

Sorry for the comment strings here, just thinking of things to get them all typed out so that I don't make any missteps.  If for some reason that new incremental backup, caused my old incremental backups to vanish (even though I still see them & there file sizes on my external backup drive).  Is it something as simple as deleting the latest incremental backup & then all is ok again?  I don't want to delete anything without knowing for sure.  So I am kind of stuck at the moment since acronis won't let me see the previous dates in the recovery tab.  I am trying to open the full backup in windows explorer now & will let it run over night to see if it opens to show all those folders.  Its a 1.6 TB file, so it takes a while for it to open.

Michael Verdi wrote:

And one more thing to complicate this issue.  My drive that crashed was "G".  When I connected a new hard drive today it became "G".  So while I was away, my backup ran same time every night as it does & backed up the new "G".  So now I have a full backup of my correct "G" drive, 3 incremental backups of "G" drive & then the latest in the string is of the wrong "G" drive.  But when I go into acronis on the recovery tab, it only shows today's date & not the other dates.  How can I access the correct files now?

Michael, the first thing you should do here is to remove the daily schedule for your G drive to avoid losing your old backups of the original drive.

Assuming that this G drive is not an OS / boot drive, then you should be able to access the older backups via the ATI GUI by expanding the dates shown in the Recovery tab, but this in turn requires that your automatic cleanup settings allow for keeping those older backups and that they haven't been removed due to those settings.

Click on the option to 'Open Location' for your backup task for drive G and then check what actual files are present on your backup drive? 

Steve,

Thank you for your reply.  Attached is some images that may help out with the situation as well.  One is of my external drive and the files that are on it.  The red ones are of my drive I am trying to retrieve.  The one in red is the new one that ran yesterday for the external drive that plugged in as G.

If I open True Image GUI and click on the backup that I would like to retrieve, once it eventually loads (takes a bit since the original file is 1.6TB for the drop down menu, it only shows yestersday's backup.  It doesn't give me any option of seeing the previous ones.

Which honestly, I find odd, because if it defeats the purpose of an incremental backup if Acronis can't still retrieve the previous ones.  All the files and file sizes are accurate based on the image I attached.

Oh as for my attempt to access the FULL backup version in explorer thru my hard drive, I let that run over night since it was taken a while.  I am currently waiting for it to load on the last screen which if it works will show me those files.  Its listing as H drive > Work Drive_full_b8_s1_v1 > Backup Thu, Aug 02..... > G: is what is now trying to load.

If I do get the files to load up this way, is it simply safe to just copy paste them to the new drive?

Michael, the good news is that your screen image of the files shows that your older backup files are present and therefore you should be able to recover your data from these.

The not so good news is that ATI 2019 appears to have a bug that wasn't discovered during the recent Beta testing phase in that the Recovery tab is not showing the older backups correctly.  I have just checked with one of my own backup tasks and am only seeing the most recent backup file (via Date/Time) being offered for Recovery, ignoring the several earlier files that are shown in the backup location!

If you are able to open the backup file via Explorer, then you should be able to recover your files & folders by copying them in that way, but ideally, you should be using the latest incremental file rather than the full backup file, the incremental will pull in all the other files in the backup chain.

What you can try doing here is to use the 'Add existing backup' option in the ATI GUI (click on the 'v' icon to the right of Add backup) then select the Work Drive_inc_b8_s4_v1.tib file from your backup drive, then you should be able to recover your G drive original backup in that way.

Steve,

Thanks for this info.  Yeah I was a bit worried because the drop down was showing my previous versions yesterday before this new backup ran.  However, knowing I had the files sitting on a drive, I knew there had to be some way, otherwise Acronis wouldn't be all that useful.

My new hard drive is arriving on Thursday (apparently most stores don't carry high capacity WD black drives for some reason), so once I have it I will get that setup.

In the meantime I will do as you mentioned above to an external hard drive.  Will I have any issues with long file paths copying to external drives vs to an internal drive?  I know I have had those messages in the past & thats the only thing that worries me at this point.

And lastly, I did one more restart of my computer (did a few yesterday), but wanted to do a restart to see if my previous incrementals showed up in the drop downs.  When I restarted my G drive was back as a D drive.  So at the moment I am accessing the drive & copying things off to an external, but not sure when the drive will give out again.

For the restore you are mentioning from Acronis, for a 1.6 TB file with 3 incremental backups on top of that, how long does it take to restore.  Is it hours or days?

Difficult to say how long the restore will take as it has a number of variables to consider, i.e. speed of the USB connection, number of files / folders, how deep nested, size of files etc.  If you know how long the backup took to create the full backup image, then the restore should be a little quicker.

Michael, is it correct to say that the drive you are attempting to recover is a data drive? I've never used ATI to backup my data drives, I use Syncback Pro mainly because I can directly access the backups. I actually create two backups of all of my data and multiple sets of ATI backups for my Boot drive. 

I also use HardDisk Sentenial to monitor the health of my 11 drives (all are attached to the motherboard) on my desktop, it also runs on my laptops. The main benefit of HDS is the monitoring of the drive health allowing you to replace a drive before it actually dies, assuming it slowly dies. 

There are some risks in my entire procedure and most likely I will live with the risks until it bites me.

FYI I've used ATI to recover my boot drive numerous times all of which have been successful. All of the recoveries resulted from me doing something stupid, e.g. I did something I should not have and used the BU to erase my goof

If you have to recover using a USB2 connection, most likely the entire process will take about 1 day.

Good luck with the recovery and keep us posted.

@ Steve, thanks.  I believe it normally takes around 8-10 hours to create the first full backup.  So I will see how it goes when I run it tonight.

@ John, yeah this is a 2TB data drive.  Some of the stuff I have backed up on a cloud system, but helped them learn a few years ago that their cloud, even though is "unlimited files" actually does have a limit of around 3 million files & then it won't back up any further.  So I eventually started over with them & only backed up certain folders & not everything on this drive.  I believe about 1/3 of the drive is on the cloud.  Then I had 2 full backups on external drives that create a full backup every 20 days & incremental backups on days 2-19.

I have multiple external drives, so my next step after this recovery is to keep my process the same in having ATI back up twice on 2 separate drives as it does now.  But then use something like you suggested with Syncback Pro to have one other external drive that is constantly mirroring my internal drive.  I assume Syncback copies as if it is the main drive so that I can access the data directly at any point?

Question, I got everything to load up with the Work Drive_inc_b8_s4_v1.tib file in ATI GUI.  My question is I changed the drive to restore it to as I want it to go to my I drive.  I set it to that drive, but when I clicked back up, it then went back to the ATI GUI screen & started the process & looks like it was restoring H to G (original work drive before the crash) rather than H to I as I wanted.  Is that normal?  I stopped the process, but starting it over again.

Michael, if you have selected the correct target drive, then the restore should be fine, but if there is any doubt, then it is recommended to disconnect any drives not involved in the recovery operation, or else take the target drive to another computer and do the recovery using the Acronis Rescue Media there.

Thanks, I may have to try the recovery on another computer.  Because I cancelled it before & am trying it again.  It takes about 90 minutes for ATI GUI to show the recovery backup file structure.  And when I click next & get to the destination drive, I choose drive I.  I don't even have a G drive any longer (the failed drive was a G) & according to the screen shot it looks like it is trying to put it back on G even though no G is connected.  G was the original drive the backup came from before it failed.  I didn't even select keep the original file structure, since it made it look like I: > G drive contents > then folder names

Michael, when doing Recovery from within Windows using ATI this is actually how it works by continuing to show the original Backup task selections in the panels shown, which we all agree is very confusing and can catch new users out completely.

This is another reason why the MVP's normally recommend doing all recoveries / restores using the Acronis Rescue media as that method is a whole lot clearer and understandable!

See forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup which documents the process when using the Rescue media.

Thanks so much for your fast replies.  Ok this is good to know.  Since I have it running, I will let it go for a bit & see how long it takes.  So far it has been about 45 minutes & the bar is still calculating the time & is still the same as it was in the screen shot which is just under the RE in (Recovering...) so it looks like this is going to take a while.

Does the recover an entire disk backup take the same amount of time & is just a clearer process?  Or does it actually cut the time down as well?  If it cuts the time down then it may be worth it for me to switch to that process today.

Given the size of data involved, I suspect that either method will take some time to complete - the main differences between the methods are that in Windows you have access to system caching etc, whereas when using Rescue media you are working in an offline environment without any interference from any other Windows processes / security applications etc.

And just to be clear, if I do switch to your suggestion this is the PDF that I am looking for: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8uZDIFmupY7X01OQ1NqY0VWa2M ?  And it does not matter at this point that I previously did not create the acronis bootable rescue media?

Got it, so since its during the bootup stage, whichever computer I use for that, would be not usable for the duration of the process running.  I will let the current restore run for next couple of hours & see what happens.  I imagine it would have to show some sort of movement in the progress bar, where as so far I have seen none.  It is definitely responding though, because I can click around with the ATI GUI & it is not frozen.

Once I get things restored, I will have to think of a better way to backup in the future if possible thru acronis.  I figured worst case my data would be restored in the same amount of time it takes to backup the full backup, which so far doesn't seem to be the case.

It got passed the 1st phase of "recovering the files" but now is queued.  Not sure what happens next, but it so far is moving along.  For anyone that views this thread in the future for 1.6 TIB file, it took about 17 hours to get to this point, after the initial 1 1/2 hours of loading up the file in the ATI GUI.  Will post back with a completed time once it is all finalized.

Due to the queued status I have been looking thru other posts, but all those seem to pertain to backups & not recoveries.  In this one, I don't have a pause or resume button.  My only option is to stop.

I do see all the files on the recovered drive, however they still each have a weird file name after the filename.extension~randomstring

Acronis is still alert & running, just not sure why it is queued.

Michael, if the recovery task is still in progress, then the recovered files may not be complete yet, hence they carry the weird extra characters in the file name used by the recovery process while rebuilding the complete file structures.

If you stop this process then you will be left with a significant cleanup task to deal with all these files with strange names!

I have very rarely performed recoveries from within the Windows ATI application, and certainly none as large as yours, so have never seen such a task have a queued status.  My advice would be to leave it to run its course for as long as possible.  A queued task should resume once whatever it was queued on has been completed.

No problem, I will leave it as queued & see what happens.  It has been queued for close to 2 hours, so I will just continue to let this process run throughout the day & see what happens.

One further bit of information.  I noticed that the arrow switched directions in ATI, it went from pointing left with G < H in the original screen shot I posted yesterday.  To now pointing right in this new screen shot G > H.

I don't even have a G drive hooked up currently.  So is it possible that it now thinks it needs to back up?  I did have my system set to send email notifications when a backup fails, so if so I should get some of those at some point.  I thought I disabled the backup before proceeding with the restore, but can't check at this point as stop is the only option.

I will still continue to let it run.  I guess I can wait another 6 hours or so & see what happens.

Just to reply, the issue was exactly that it finished the recovery & then was trying to backup.  I found this out because I switched my D to my G drive then went back into acronis & the queue was gone & it was now trying to backup.  I stopped the backup, then went to my new I drive & all the files were in there, properly named without the string.

I have my new internal drive coming today, so I will essentially be doing a fresh recovery onto that once its here just in case anything didn't complete entirely.  But I will make sure to check to make sure that my G drive is disabled from backing up, so that it will complete the process without going into a queue.

Michael, thanks for the update and glad that the recovery completed.  Hope all goes well when your new internal drive arrives.