Strange recent behaiour of TI2014
Hi
I am using TI2014 to make regular backups of the HD of my Windows 7 Home Premium Laptop. There are three partitions on the Laptop's HD - the System Drive Partition(C), the System Reserve Partition (Unmounted) and a Data Drive (D).
I have been making regular fortnightly full backups of my HD on this Laptop to an External HDD using TI2014 for several years now and have always used the same settings i.e. Disc Mode, Custom Full Backup and no Schedule.
Yesterday I made a new backup and after it completed, I validated it as usual. The TI window showed the single entry of the backup as it should and I checked that it worked by recovering a few selelcted files to my desktop from various folders. When I looked at the .tib files on my External HDD, instead of the usual single file I found 2 files labelled the same but V1 and V2.
I thought there had been a glitch in the TI2014 software or that I had perhaps set it up wrongly so today I made another full disc backup. Once again, there was a single entry in the TI2014 windows and recovery of files worked fine and it was validated and was stated to be valid. Yet, to my dismay, there was again 2 files in the sub folder on my External HDD instead of the single file I expected to see; V1 and V2.
Can anyone shed any light on what the problem might be as I am concerned that if the necessity arose I may not be able to recover my HD from these latest backups.
I attach screen shots of mt settings, the TI2014 Window ans the External HDD Window.
The backup looks fine. By default, Acronis uses "automatic" for the backup .tib size. In most cases this will result in a single very large .tib file. However, it is not uncommong for it to be broken into 2 or more files in the same backup. It is more common to see this broken up if your disk is very fragmented. If your backup .bit is say, 50Gb normally, but the largest continguous section on the disk is less than that, then Acronis will use the largest space for the .tib and when that block of free space is used up, it will start a new block of data to continue the backup - creating a second backup file for that job, or a possibly more depending on how much data is backing up and how big the available contingous blocks are. As you start running out of disk space on your backup storage drive (as it becomes more full), this can be more common as well.
Personally, I don't use "automatic" for my backup jobs. 1) What's the next biggest file on your computer in comparision to your backup.tib - a bluray backup, if you have one. Everything else probably compares in comparison. 2) When writing backup across a network, a single large file, if the network drops, may require the backup to start from scratch... however, if broken into smaller chunks, may pick up from the last backup .tib section that completed so you don't have to start over completely. 3) extremely large files require contingous free space on the disk 4) Creating large files requires more memory usage. Really, it's up to you and many people are fine with the automatic, large .tib format. To each there own, but if your disk is fragmented, or starting to get low on space, it's normal to see the automatic sized jobs broken into 2 or more sections in these cases.
Thank you both for your respose. I would hazard a guess that it is a combination of an increasingly large backup and the lack of contiguous free space. I wasn't aware that breaking my backup into more than one .tib file was OK.
I use two 1Tb LaCie External USB HDDs for my backups from my two Laptops and old PC and have other stuff on them also. Although I do defrag these drives occasionally (using Raxco Perfect Disc software) I exclude my backup files from the defrag process thinking it might corrupt them or make them unusable.
Yeah, I'm with you. I would probably avoid defragging existing backups. It should be ok to, but might be safer to leave them alone. Ultimately, if you really want to verify your backup, testing a recovery to a practice or extra drive would be ideal. That way, you don't have to mess with any original source data or overwrite it just for the purpose of testing a real recovery from time to time.
I just checked my HDD and found that it was virtually full so that does seem to have been the problem. I have deleted a significant amount of old data and am now defragging the drive - if it corrupts any of my backups it won't matter as I have others on the second Ext HDD.
I might also move data other than backups to another drive to keep the HDD uncluttered and with plenty of free space.
Eric, thanks for the update / feedback. I would suggest running a Validation for the backup tasks that created your backup images on the defragged drive when you have time, this will show if there are any obvious issues with the backups, plus also help reconcile the Acronis Database if you have manually deleted any files.