ABR11 build 17437 and 17438 will not validate
For convenience, my machine has a separate archive disk in the same box, and otherwise has Win7 Pro, x64, all latest updates. The extra drive holds nothing but ABR backup files, usually for an 'incremental' plan. My user account has admin access (and no, I don't want to see any advice about not running as admin, thankyouverymuch).
I recently discovered that ABR11, 17437 (workstation), was unable to validate anything that was saved. After much experimenting and after update to 17438, ABR11 still will not run a 'simple validation' -- it always ends in an error, whether validation is run as part of the backup plan or run manually. If I attach a separate disk through a Firewire port, archive validation appears to complete normally (don't yet know whether it will also work with a disk that is attached through a USB2 port). It seems this is a bug in builds 17437 and 17438, and I notice there is a similar thread that was started for some earlier build.
One other thread mentions '...disable Disaster Recovery Report...', but I don't find any such choice in archive plan options. Is Acronis aware of this problem? Is there some known workaround?
So far, the disk is not the problem. Also, I can retrieve files from the full disk archive -- that is on the internal drive -- without any other apparent error. Win7 does not find a problem with the internal drive; file content of that drive is not significantly fragmented. I can modify the backup plan to ignore system files, page files, 'hidden' files, whatever-you-happen-to-like files, yet ABR11 will not validate the archive when that archive has been saved to an internal drive.
FWIW -- I installed Win7 x86 in early April, but only discovered the problem recently. It's at least possible that one or more updates from Microsoft are the actual problem, but by now there have been so many that I'd likely need to reinstall the OS to find the culprit. There are other things I must do between now and the end of the year.
One last experiment may have solved the problem. Up to this point, there was no indication whatsoever of any kind of disk problem or virus problem anywhere. Finally, I decided to delete all copies of backup files, archive files, the archive Catalog and one *.xml file (apparently created by ABR11 as part of Vault setup). Next, I changed the 'incremental' backup plan to include VSS, then re-ran an 'incremental' backup of C & D drives. Now, verification appears to be working normally.
I don' t know whether there was some kind of hidden error in the Catalog, *.xml file, some issue related to VSS, or some combination of all three, but for now it seems the problem is resolved.