How can I check that a backup has worked and matches what exists on the disc?

In the Recovery Tab you should see an option to Validate. My understanding of this tool is that checks the checksum of the file with the checksum that was created when the backup was performed, if they match then there is a some degree of certainty that the data is not corrupt. Maybe that is what you are looking for. What I personally did was create a complete system backup then restore on an entirely different drive. I then booted from the restored file to ensure that this program was going to behave in the way that I thought it should. After I was convinced that the program was working as I thought it should I occasionally use the validation tool to check the integrity of the backup file.

The only way to be 100% sure that a Backup will work when restored is to do an actual restore to a spare hard drive.  If this is not possible then the next best thing is to validate the Backup Image using the bootable Rescue CD.

Thanks for your feedback.

So are we saying that this backup software does not provide proof that the backup it took matches what was on the disc, and that the only way to check is to try and restore each backup file?

I was expecting to be able to atleast check the number of files or the like?

Also, my machine just froze during a backup, however I see no way of finding out that this effected my backup, other than i knew it was running. However when I move to scheduled backups, I would expect things to simply run without attention. How would I check and receover/continue a backup in this case?

You can validate the backup....This isn't 100% PROOF that the backup is good, but it is a good approximation. To be sure that it is a good backup you likely would need to restore the image and then you would know for certain. I would say that this would apply for any backup software. The only way to be entirely sure is to restore and see. I will say I have yet to have an issue where a backup image passed validation and was not usable but some other people may have. On your second issue, you should still be able to run validation on the .tib file if it is there. There is a problem obviously if your computer is freezing and I would be surprised if the backup completed without error if the machine was locked up. You can run backups on a schedule without attention, so if that is not working you may have an issue.

David,
When TrueImage creates a full disk image of your disk, it is NOT copying each file by file. What is is doing is copying sectors of the hard drive which is in use so the number files to Acronis is a number that does not exist.

When a backup is created, it is a snapshot at a moment in time. After the snapshot is made, then the backup is begun to be written to disk. Any data change after the backup is begun is not captured inside the backup in progress.

Most likely (not guaranteed), a freezing merely caused a delayed write to the disk. If it were mine, I would stop the backup and restart it again or allow it to continue and perform an additional backup very shortly thereafter.

David no that is not what people are saying.
A validation of the .tib file is proof positive the .tib file is correct/valid.
what people are saying is IF your HD crashed and you needed to restore
then you would go to the store buy a new HD put in the PC and boot from the recovery CD.
At this magic moment in time you NO longer have Windows system, you have just booted from a LINUX cd. The linux drivers for your hardware are PROBABLY compatible to your hardware but lets face it until you try them you do not "know". After a HD crash is a hell of time to discover that if this true (or not).
The advice they were giving is you is to go boot off the recovery cd's and do a validate from there now. After you do this its wise to also do a a restore of file of your choosing from that archive. If you can validate image from the linux cd and recover a file then you have proof positive that your linux drivers can both read from the source .tib files and write to the target HD. With this test done you now "know" that when the time comes you WILL be recover from your backup.

If your HD ever crashes, go buy a new drive, take out the old, insert the new, boot from the CD and use acronis TI to restore/rebuild your HD from the backup. Over the years I have done this several times with 100% success every time. BTW: I use GroverH's guide every time. hyperlinks to this guide is plastered all over this forum go get it, print it. review it. Everything you need to successfully restore is laid out for you. If you review it now before you need it when the time comes and your kinda in panic mode its better that your not learning as you go but rather executing a procedure that you have already read about and understood.

Christopher Schwall wrote:

You can validate the backup....This isn't 100% PROOF that the backup is good, but it is a good approximation. To be sure that it is a good backup you likely would need to restore the image and then you would know for certain. I would say that this would apply for any backup software. The only way to be entirely sure is to restore and see. I will say I have yet to have an issue where a backup image passed validation and was not usable but some other people may have. On your second issue, you should still be able to run validation on the .tib file if it is there. There is a problem obviously if your computer is freezing and I would be surprised if the backup completed without error if the machine was locked up. You can run backups on a schedule without attention, so if that is not working you may have an issue.

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah my computer freezing is a whole new problem, and very much doubt its related to the backup software.

However it is a slight worry that I have no report to confirm that the back did run and what it backed up, as my intention was to use the scheduling for unattended backups, but in my view if there is no report then whats the point? As I will have to manually restore each backup to ensure its safe. If we at least had a number of files, overall size...then we could atleast say its backup up what it should have backed up. I have seen reports from other backup software, and presumed it was standard.

Just out of interest, I already found its not backing up all files and logged a ticket for that. The files are a basically family photos, so are all jpg's, so nothing odd or temporary. However the backup was atleast 150/200 (different at different times) files different from the source, which (for family photos backups) I personally cannot accept.

GroverH wrote:

David,
When TrueImage creates a full disk image of your disk, it is NOT copying each file by file. What is is doing is copying sectors of the hard drive which is in use so the number files to Acronis is a number that does not exist.

When a backup is created, it is a snapshot at a moment in time. After the snapshot is made, then the backup is begun to be written to disk. Any data change after the backup is begun is not captured inside the backup in progress.

Most likely (not guaranteed), a freezing merely caused a delayed write to the disk. If it were mine, I would stop the backup and restart it again or allow it to continue and perform an additional backup very shortly thereafter.

Thanks for your reply.

The freezing is definately another problem, but not related to the backup software etc. But it did highlight an area of concern.

I understand what you are saying, but if I were scheduled (unattended) backups, then I have nothing to confirm that things went wrong - see what I mean?

Being a techie myself I can also see holes in my comments. Such as if the machine crashed there would be no reports - as the machine has gone down. But could there not be a recovery of the backup that was running? Is it not possible that the software could know the backup did not complete, and then either restart the backup or send a message? Or atleast provide a report?

To have no report on the backups and what they contain, leaves us blind, and as suggested, then bring on the need to manually check each backup.

My advice is that you don't use True Image to backup photographs-jpgs. True Image is best for making a disk image so you don't have to reinstall Windows and other programmes. If your system hard drive crashes you boot from the Rescue Disc and you can restore the whole drive

Photographs do not compress much as they are already compressed and by using True Image you stuff them all in a tib file that if it gets damaged or corrupted you will not be able to access any of them- not one!!!

A lot of people here use the free programme Karen's Replicator to backup data files to external drives. It leaves them in their native format- jpg. Once it backs up the initial number it will only backup new files from the folder when you next run it.

You can get it at http://www.karenware.com/powertools/powertools.asp

oracledba wrote:

David no that is not what people are saying.
A validation of the .tib file is proof positive the .tib file is correct/valid.
what people are saying is IF your HD crashed and you needed to restore
then you would go to the store buy a new HD put in the PC and boot from the recovery CD.
At this magic moment in time you NO longer have Windows system, you have just booted from a LINUX cd. The linux drivers for your hardware are PROBABLY compatible to your hardware but lets face it until you try them you do not "know". After a HD crash is a hell of time to discover that if this true (or not).
The advice they were giving is you is to go boot off the recovery cd's and do a validate from there now. After you do this its wise to also do a a restore of file of your choosing from that archive. If you can validate image from the linux cd and recover a file then you have proof positive that your linux drivers can both read from the source .tib files and write to the target HD. With this test done you now "know" that when the time comes you WILL be recover from your backup.

If your HD ever crashes, go buy a new drive, take out the old, insert the new, boot from the CD and use acronis TI to restore/rebuild your HD from the backup. Over the years I have done this several times with 100% success every time. BTW: I use GroverH's guide every time. hyperlinks to this guide is plastered all over this forum go get it, print it. review it. Everything you need to successfully restore is laid out for you. If you review it now before you need it when the time comes and your kinda in panic mode its better that your not learning as you go but rather executing a procedure that you have already read about and understood.

Thanks for your response, I will checkout the guide.

I have to say that I disagree with how safe the validation option is, unless I do not understand what its supposed to actualy do. In my case I took a backup, it completed, said it was fine, the validation also confirmed this, but after a test restore the backup did not contain all files. So as such, this is a failure, and has gone un-reported.

I am backing up family photos, which as you can imagine, need to be backed up without error or missing files.

I planned to use unattended so I knew my backup was taken care of, but at present I cannot see that I am ever going to be able to rely on this, as I need to check things manually.

So I am now wondering, whats the point?

Karen's Replicator will report what files are backed up correctly and if there are any errors and plenty more

You can schedule it as well

Try it out You won't go back to TI if your only need is to backup photos

Tatou wrote:

Karen's Replicator will report what files are backed up correctly and if there are any errors and plenty more

You can schedule it as well

Try it out You won't go back to TI if your only need is to backup photos

Yes this looks great to me.

Its a shame, as I had heard so much about Acronis software. I knew it was possibly overkill for my requirements, but from a techie point of view I am amazed at how many people think its great but there is no real way to check the backups its doing are complete.

Ah well.

unless specifically excluded, never ever had Acronis TI "miss" a file - even once, photo, text, zip or otherwise. not sure how to reconcile that experience with report that things are "missing" from your .tib files.

David Martin wrote:

I am amazed at how many people think its great but there is no real way to check the backups its doing are complete.

Have you checked the log for successful completion? Once you have shown that validation works, the recovery CD will work with your hardware and you can restore a file or image, the program works for your system-these are the key factors. The log file will then let you know if scheduled tasks proceeded and completed OK. If the validation works, the backup is complete...on a sector basis except for the placeholders for the pagefile, etc.

As others have stated, TI provides for verifying that the .tib files are self-consistent.

Of course, that does not guarantee that ALL data, etc. was backed up, but there's a pretty high probabilty that it was.

When I first started using image backup software (Ghost 10 and TI 9), i decided to write programs that could be used to compare the content of an actual partition with the correspnding partition in the archive.

For this reason, I will ONLY use image backup programs that allow the mounting of partitions from within an archive.

Of course, for some partitions, the content in the partition will have changed by the time you do such a compare, but you can still get a good idea by using the following programs:

[URL="http://www.standards.com/index.html?GetDiskSpaceUsed"]GetDiskSpaceUsed[/URL]
[URL="http://www.standards.com/index.html?ReadFile"]ReadFile[/URL]
[URL="http://www.standards.com./index.html?GetFileTypeDistribution"]GetFileTypeDistribution[/URL]
[URL="http://www.standards.com./index.html?CompareDrives"]CompareDrives[/URL]

Indeed, even tho I just purchased TI 2010 a few minutes ago, I will be comparing the archive of another backup program with the content on disk, and I will then compare the disk with TI's archive.

David,
Which version of TI are you using? What Windows OS are you using/ 32 or 64bit, etc.

I'm sure you are aware that heat can be a real issue when a computer freezes.
Have you checked inside the case to make sure the vents are open and fuzz balls are gone?
Have you checked both the source and target disks for disk errors?
Have you checked the Acronis log file for its error report?
When creating a backup task--even manually, there is instructions the user must provide to TrueImage on the handling of errors. Have you reviewed your settings?
Is there any information in the Windows Event files which can provide any help?

What type of backup are you doing? Are you performing a full disk backup which includes all partitions both hidden and diagnostic? or Are you performing a backup only the complete system partition or of a data disk; or are you performing a files and folders backup which will not help you if your system should fail. In my situation, my docs file and personal data is on the 2nd partition so it is not included when I backup only the C partitions. In order to get all my data, I always, always perform disk option backup which includes everything on the disk.

Do you think you can create instructions can reproduce the problem of files missing form backup?

I tried to prove this would occur. Here is what I did:
I have PC with apx 35Gig worth of photo images accumulated over the recent years.
I took last nights INCR backup and had acronis mount that image as a drive letter
used utility called ultra compare to compare the entire c:\ drive to the mounted .tib file drive.

After very extensive compare UC proved with 100% assurance that 100% of all files were present.
UC of course DID find differences however I was able to completly explain each and every one of them by automatic processes/updates which windows, anti-virus, anti-spam performed after the backup was taken.

I must say this was an effort. I'm glad I did it but I am not surprised by the results.
A image must be an exact point in time image.
Are we saying acronis will "randomly" "drop"/"exclude" files from a backup?
I would think that there would be thousands of posts about it.
That does not seem to be the case.
Or am I missing something?