Cannot restore from incremental backup
Hi, hope you can help. I am using True Image Home 2010.
I have been doing an incremental backup of all my important files which runs regularly to a separate hard drive.
I have now had a major hardware failure and need to restore from this backup. However, when I try to restore it doesn't list any files available for restoration, even though I can see all the relevant files are there and there is nothing missing from the sequence. It prompts me for the password, so at least I know it is reading the backup OK.
My only thought is that when the NAS failed that perhaps it treated all the files as having been deleted. Is there a way of making it restore from an earlier version, or is there something else I am missing here please?
Thanks
Keith
Hi Scott, many thanks for getting back to me on this.
Just tried doing it that way, and am getting an error message "Acronis True Image has encountered a problem and needs to close". It asks me for password, then says "processing" for a couple of minutes, before coming up with this error message.
Incidentally, stupid question I know, but I am presuming that if and when I get it running the incremental backup I choose is what dictates the date to which I am restoring, and so if there is for instance a recent corruption I can still restore all the data prior to that?
Many thanks
Keith
Yes, if you have multiple incremental backups, you can choose a specific date and the restore will restore all backups beginning with the full plus any incrementals prior to and including your selected backup. If the selected date if corrupt, then choose a date prior to corrupt one. If it too is corrupt, try an earlier date, etc.
The backup can be restored using the bootable media CD. Boot from the CD and browse to the path and location where the backups are stored. Drive letters may differ in the search but if your disks has volume names, use those instead of drive letters..
Firstly, a massive thank you to both Scott Hieber and GroverH for their help with this.
I tried using a bootable CD and was still unable to recover, and then tried it using several different machines, again to no avail.
In the end I downloaded a copy of TIH 2012, made a bootable CD from that, and tried recovering: and it works perfectly! So it seems that TIH2010 can make an incremental backup which is too complex for it to recover. I would add that this was a very complex set (it was actually nearly 4,000 incremental backups, as I had them running hourly).
And the real lesson learned - always test your backups to make sure you can recover using them!! I have always preached this, but TrueImage has always been so reliable for everything I have done with it in the past that I got complacent.
Anyway, thanks once again to everyone for all their help with this.
Thanks
Keith
Keef,
One of the fallacies of using the incremental backup for restoring is that each backup depends upon the prior backup to be readable and non-corrupt. If any of the older incrementals become non-usable, all of the newer inc's become worthless.
It is much better to make more frequent full backups than to depend upon a large number of inc's being all in perfect condition.