Insuring a good image
After making a full, incremental or differential backup and writing the files to a hard drive, is it possible to then make a copy of those backup files to another disk or partition.
I had been told that moving or copying the backup files might corrupt them. I was also told defragging a partition that the file(s) were on would also possibly corrupt them.
I am using TI Home 2010.
thanks
True Image backup files are just that - files. The only difference is that they are likely larger than files you normally deal with.
You can copy them, you can defrag the volume they are stored on but remember that every operation on a file, whether or not it is a TI backup file or not, does introduce an element of risk because you are reading, possibly processing, and re-writing the file.
It is easy to ensure the integrity of the copied or defragged file just by running the TI Validation check on the file. It is a very stringent checksum calculation with 4000 checksums/GB of backup file. Any checksum, even just one, that doesn't compare exactly with the one stored in the archive when TI created the backup will result in a "corrupt archive" message.
My view on defragging a volume that contains only TI archives is that it is a waste of time. There is a good chance the files will never be accessed which is unlike some Windows files that are accessed very frequently. Also, doing a TI operation normally takes quite a few minutes and shaving a few seconds off the process with a well-defragged backup volume isn't worth the time taken to do it and the the extra risk of screwing up the volume/files.