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Integrity of Incremental Backup in True Image 2012

Thread needs solution

I have been backing up my photos for most of this year using incremental backup and carried on as Acronis indicated the backup was valid. But beware!

However, when I needed to recover them all it became apparent that the original full backup had gone awol and was not to be found. So despite the best efforts of Support I have lost all my photos.
This is especially frustrating as I have about 200 GB of actual incremental backup of the relevant drive.
Has anyone got a magic tip to enable me to get at least some of my photos.
Just hoping!
Tim

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Do a search for all .tib files on that drive, in hopes that you can locate the full backup.

You should not allow an incremental chain to become too long. An incremental restore depends upon every incremental in the chain being valid, including the original full. It's better to limit each chain to just a few incrementals, followed by a fresh full backup to start a new chain.

You should validate backups periodically. That would have alerted you much sooner if the full backup were missing or unreadable.

I understand what you are saying but my point is that the last incremental backup in the chain which is the only one visible in the Backup & Restore screen is clearly flagged as Valid. Thus, being a user and not a programmer I took that at face value.

Validate it to make sure.

Tim,

Sorry for your loss. I have been there :-(
For irreplaceable content (things you cannot buy back even if you had the money), you *have* to have alternate backup strategies and you should avoid using proprietary containers. A simple file copy from time to time to some disk you take to the office or off-site in general is enough for a redundant backup.

My POV is that it doesn't make sense anyway to store already compressed files in an archive like a TIB file. If the TIB file gets corrupted (and it happens as you can see), you lose *all* your content. With ATI, you can use the ZIP file format for file backups. Make sure you can open the ZIP files without ATI. I believe you can't if you encrypt the ZIP with ATI.