Acronis True Image 2010 Home
I originally posted this in the backup and recovery forum, which is the wrong place for this issue.
I've been trying to do a backup of my photography internal 1T hard drive to a USB external 500G hard drive. The operation keeps failing. I can make the same identical backup on a 750G hard drive of a different brand, still USB plug in. I'm running Windows Vista 32 bit Home addition on an HP Pavilion desktop. Any ideas as to what would cause such an error. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with my external hard drive. Thanks.
Dan
I'm doing the backup from an internal hard drive to an external hard drive, no CD's involved. I also don't want to make disk backups, I have a very large amount of photographs that take up a lot of memory. This is all just within windows, full backup.
I'm not suggesting doing backups onto CDs, that's a totally impratical method. I'm suggesting using the BootCD to to perform the operation form your source hadisk to your target harddisk. The backup can then be restored to any disk you like. Plus you can store many backups on one hdisk -- with cloining you can only "store" one. The amount of data to back up doesn't make a diff between cloning and backups.
And just so we are all on the same page, photos simply stored on a hard drive do not take up memory, they take up *disk* space. That aside, the regular users here would suggest that you NOT use True Image to backup photos since that puts them in a proprietary format. There are other simpler alternatives that do the same job - Karen's Replicator, Sync Toy to name a few.
True Image's strength lies in it *whole disk backup* feature.
Well, some regular users would use ATI to backup things like photos -- but only because we are doing whole disk backups to keep things simple and not confuse ATI ;)
if you are separately backing up jpgs or mp3s or mp4s, and such, just copy, excopy, or use one of the free programs like MS backup and nay ofhte dozens of other free choices. Backup compression won't help becuse such files are already heavily compressed.
Dan,
If you have some time to do some background research, I believe you would benefit by reading the backup strategies comments offered by a variety of other users. See item 12 in my signature index. Also, if you still have some time, I believe you would also find the links below to be helpful readings. Many users chooses to make additional backups of their photo's or audio files via non-proprietary methods including having plain copies on additional drives not connected to computer.
[b]Recommend backup scheme for photos, music[/b] 32 replies--2 pages
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=164175
[b]My backup strategy Escalader[/b]
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=159177
[b]SAVE MY MUSIC COLLECTION! PLEASE[/b] (29 replies --2 pages)
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=167710
Thanks for the responses. I found Acronis True Image and thought it would be the perfect solution since it will detect whether a file has been modfied and make a copy of it...compared to windows which will only make a copy of new files (modified ones aren't recognized as being important to copy). I've used SyncToy a couple times and I can't remember why I didn't like it, but from the sounds of it, I should go back and work out the bugs. ATI was very convenient to make an exact copy of one hard drive (full of photos) to another external by backing up from specific folders, not clone disk.
I'm not currently at home so I'm unable to try a C: drive backup to see if I could still use ATI to store my main computer elements to the external drive so I hope I don't get the same error. I just find it strange that the same identical process to copy photos from one hard drive to another works with one external but not to the other.
I am NOT saying do not use TrueImage. I am saying to have more than one backup method for your photos. You need both a Plan A plus a Plan B. If either fails, you have the other to recover your photos from.
When it comes to photos, personal documents, home videos, purchased music, etc, you want to have an off-site backup strategy. Imaging your computer regularly is good to recover from those "oh crap" moments, but won't help you much if your house burns down, computers gets stolen, etc.
I use Windows Live Sync to sync all those personal files between my computer and another at my work place. It's free and works really well.
The other thing I do is I have a hosting account with GoDaddy for our personal family domain. I use ATI to backup personal files via FTP on our domain which has 100GB of space.
Then I also image twice a week with ATI to a D-Link DNS-323 that is in the basement for complete and fast recoveries.
Some very good suggestions here. I tried SyncToy again last night on the hard drive that is having problems, and a similar issue occured. I'm going to backup that hard drive and reformat to NTSF because it's currently in FAT32. I'm not sure what's wrong with it, but it's odd two different programs are having an issue with the same piece of hardware.
The 500GB hard drive is in FAT32 in one big partition? I would change that right away to NTFS. You're losing a lot in efficiency with FAT32. But I think it has a 2GB limit on the size of a file.
SyncToy works no differently than a standard Copy operation from Windows Explorer. I'd try to manually copy the files over and see if that works.
I would just copy and replace, but I don't want to have to wait 4 ours for every backup. I want to run a full backup 2 times a week and run incrementally every day...windows Vista does not offer an option for this, so I'm left with SyncToy or ATI. Someone mentioned in a post above to use two different file backup systems for photos. Maybe I'll use this hard drive that's giving me issues as my copy and replace via windows and my other external with ATI (since it seems to work just fine for some odd reason).
After the initial copy, Karen's Replicator (the one I use) will then backup only changed files so the subsequent backup is done very quickly. I believe SyncToy has the same feature.
I would just copy and replace, but I don't want to have to wait 4 ours for every backup.
I understand that. I was just suggesting to try to see if it works because that's basically all what SyncToy does. Copying. If it's truly hitting a file system limitation, doing test copying with windows explorer should tell you. This is all part of diagnosing why something as simple as SyncToy is failing you. Then again, if you can convert the drive to NTFS, go ahead then try again.
After completely reformatting the 500G Elements hard drive by WD to NTSF insteady of Fat32, I still can't run a full or incremental backup without the error popping up. I'm really not sure what the problem is, but I would like a fix of some sort, especially because synctoy is giving me the same issue...
Have you contacted WD about the problem. Have you googled to see if others have disk recognition probs with this particular modle of hdisk?
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