My TI 11 Nightmare - TI Rescue CD Restore Fails - Why?
True Image Home version 11
I have been relying on using True Image 11 as my backup tool for several years now. However an experience I had over the past couple of days has prompted me to post and is making me seriously question if I should persevere with this tool.
I have been using TI to religiously perform weekly backups of several PCs to my NAS box.
This is what happened. The HDD on my primary laptop failed. No big deal I have TI backups. I have kept 3 totally separate, complete tib files of the laptop dating back a few months. Plenty of options.
STEP 1)
Replaced failed HDD with a new unit and Booted the laptop with the bootable True Image 11 recovery disk. This allowed me to access my NAS box on my LAN and my *.tib files. So I set it to recover my most recent backup and let it do its thing. It then ran for about an hour and eventually failed with an error message quoting "possible bad sectors" or something to that effect. So I think, oh well - that tib file is probably faulty. Will try an earlier one. Other two tibs of earlier backups result in same error. Each time the restore process would run for an hour or more before failing. At this point after having spend 10 hours trying to recover I am in despair. 3 totally separate tib files (ie not incremental or differential) they all fail. Great.
STEP 2)
In despair I remove new HDD from laptop, place it on a spare sata lead in desktop PC and try recovering the tib using True Image Home v11 in windows. After waiting for about 4 hours, all the while TI is reporting itself at 55% complete and 2 min remaining for 140GB to be restored, it actually worked and my backup was successfully restored. Swapped the drive back into the laptop and it is all back an running fine.
I maintain that many people may have given up in despair at Step 1 and not thought to try Step 2. I very nearly did and just tried step 2 as a desperate last resort. This would have meant an unnecessary total data loss and all the time an inconvenience associated with it. For this reason I need to rebuild my faith int this product.
Questions:
Why was the restore via bootable TI version continually failing after running for such a long time?
Why was it reporting bad sectors in the Tibs, when subsequent recovery with TI Windows worked.
and most importantly...
Are there any improvements in TI 2010 to give me hope that by updating, this sort of thing will not happen again?
Does TI 2010 still need you to verify tib archives or an it be verified as it is backed up? (I find this to be a real pain)
On the upside I am really pleased that TI eventually recovered my data, I am just frustrated that it had to be so nerve wracking.
My guess is that the probs have more to do with restoring a file from over a network location than the PCs you are restoring to. I'd try copying the backup to a local hard disk (e.g., usb external) and then trying to restore the file from there. In any event, the newer versions of ATI tend to have newer drivers that can work with newer hardware (this isn't always the case but generally). Unfortuantely to get the newer drivers you have to buy the newer version and put up with all the "new" bugs (actually some old some new.
As for the inaccuracy of the progress bar -- it was especially bad in the dreaded ATI 11. Much better in ATI 10, and a bit hit or miss, reportedly in ATI 12/2009.
You could well be right. The way the bootable TI disk was interacting with my LAN & NAS may have been the cause. After several days my anxiety levels have dropped now that I have all my data back. I think I will buy the latest version and file away your suggestion to transfer the TIB from Network to a local drive if it happens again, heaven forbid. Thanks for taking the time to reply by the way.