Acronis 2013, should I have two copies of each backup?
I was using Acronis 2013, and I made a full backup, and incremental backups thereafter. Then, I hadn't looked at the status of the incrementals in a while, I had it set to make incrementals on mon, wed, and fri and I noticed for a while that it hadn't been making the incremental backups. The backups had become corrupted.
I was wondering if what I could do to prevent this is have two copies of the first full backup AND two copies of each incremental backup. That way, if one gets corrupted I can replace the corrupted backups with the uncorrupted backups.
But, would this work? It would be saving two copies of each incremental backup three times a week. I wonder if one got corrupted- that it couldn't save an incremental, if it also wouldn't be able to save the other incremental.
It would also be very useful if I could see the difference between incremental backups. That is, I could see what programs and files have been added/deleted since the last incremental- compare two of them, and even better if rather than restoring an incremental backup in full, if I could choose what I wanted to exclude certain files/programs from the restoration. Say if file with a virus was downloaded, then I could choose not to restore that file when I restored the backup.
You need a task for each set of backups and I would store them in separate places.
You mean on different hard drives, or just separated from each other? I'm planning on having them on separate hard drives, but I'm wondering if what happened before was it wasn't able to save an incremental backup, I think that was it. Incrementals started getting corrupted. So if it couldn't save an incremental to one backup. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be able to save the second incremental on the second backup- that would be corrupt as well, when it tried to save it.
At the very least, is there a way to tell when a backup gets corrupt, some alert you can get? So, you don't look at it after a month and see that all your incremental backups since last month were corrupt.
You can run validation anytime on existing .tib archives.
Each backup task should backup to a separate folder.
"Corrupted" is, unfortunately, a rather non-specific error message, in spite of its rather specific sounding term. It really just means that ATI can't validate the archive, which can be caused by disk errors or connection errors, rather than any problems with the .tib file itself.
Validation failure is often due to hardware issues. To troubleshoot, see Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618 and http://kb.acronis.com/content/1517
Run chkdsk /r on each partition of the internal drive, and on the external HD. If there are hidden partitions, assign letters to them so you can chkdsk.
Also run a drive checking utility from the drive manufacturer, as those sometimes catch errors missed by chkdsk.
Don't connect via a hub, a port in a monitor, a USB extension cord, etc. Connect the external drive directly to a USB port on the rear of the computer case.