Corrupt images
I've been using TI since around 2009. Lately, 2016 & 2015 versions report more and more corrupt images. I place images on 2 different hard drives. One drive is used dor documents, jpg's, mp3... If there was lots of corruptness on this drive, I would have seen or heard about the issues. My other drive is usb 3, dedicated 100% for TI images.
When I make image backups, I always do the entire backup twice, onec on each drive. It takes a long time, but, reliable images are most important for me. Most restores and validates demonstrate corrupt images.
I have been reading this forum quite a bit to se several members complain of corrupt images. I agree, it is a HUGE problem. I have also read about running chkdsk /r and ran this on both drives. Both report "Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems. No further action is required."
I believe my drives are not bad, some images restore just fine, from both drives. They are all recent sata drives.
I feel Acronis's top priority is to come up with a more reliable storage data to allow nearly 100% of all restores to go error free. All drives use CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) and ECC (Error Correcting Codes) encoding, detecting and possibily repairing bad bits. As many people know, it stores additional data, allowing bits to be corrected.
I'm not an expert on CRC nor ECC, just know they exist. I feel very strongly Acronis needs to take advantage of some of this technology to provide more reliable images. Hard drive space is not expensive, I expect all of us feel it would be worth the slightly larger files, to make images more reliable. I feel Acronis should spend more effort on correcting errors, providing more reliable restores, than changing the user interface and confusing us each year.
Hello, Norm.
Could you please elaborate, how you validate the backups? Do you do it manually by righ-clicking the backup file in Windows Explorer? Do you set up automatic validation after backup completion? Do you validate them using Bootable Media? Or before performing recovery?
This issue occurs with both of your drives (the ones where you store the backups), is that correct?
I've been using TI since around 2009. Lately, 2016 & 2015 versions report more and more corrupt images. I place images on 2 different hard drives. One drive is used dor documents, jpg's, mp3... If there was lots of corruptness on this drive, I would have seen or heard about the issues. My other drive is usb 3, dedicated 100% for TI images.
When I make image backups, I always do the entire backup twice, onec on each drive. It takes a long time, but, reliable images are most important for me. Most restores and validates demonstrate corrupt images.
I have been reading this forum quite a bit to se several members complain of corrupt images. I agree, it is a HUGE problem. I have also read about running chkdsk /r and ran this on both drives. Both report "Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems. No further action is required."
I believe my drives are not bad, some images restore just fine, from both drives. They are all recent sata drives.
I feel Acronis's top priority is to come up with a more reliable storage data to allow nearly 100% of all restores to go error free. All drives use CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) and ECC (Error Correcting Codes) encoding, detecting and possibily repairing bad bits. As many people know, it stores additional data, allowing bits to be corrected.
I'm not an expert on CRC nor ECC, just know they exist. I feel very strongly Acronis needs to take advantage of some of this technology to provide more reliable images. Hard drive space is not expensive, I expect all of us feel it would be worth the slightly larger files, to make images more reliable. I feel Acronis should spend more effort on correcting errors, providing more reliable restores, than changing the user interface and confusing us each year.
Hi Norm,
Do you run Check Disk to fix errors on the File System before creating an Image?
Do you Defragment your Hard Drives, regularly?
Do you run Check Disk, after a Blue Screen? A Blue Screen (Crash) can cause Data Corruption.
I feel the most important validation is to do a restore (with a bootable acronis recovery cd) to a scratch drive, then boot it. I rely on image backups of my Solid State C: drive, so personally feel it is worth the time to do the restore. Most of the time the restore succeeds, right after the backup, otherwise I re-image the C drive until restore succeds. Peridiocally, (months later) I'll restore my most recent backup, boot it, then go to the next recent backup, boot it. That's when I have reliability isues. I do backups to both a built in data drive and a 1TB usb3 drive.
I have run Spinrite level 4 on my internal drive for about 10 hours and it showed no recovered, no defective, no unrecovered sectors, so am quite confident it is a solid drive. I have also run CHKDSK /R on both my C: and data drives. That has not shown any repairable errors.
I have not defragmentated a drive for years, assume Windows writes the sectors wherever it needs to.
I have been running Windows 10 and don't think I have had one blue screen. Prior to that, Win 7 was also quite reliable.
Am I the only person getting too many corrupt files when a restore is performed?
I believe my drives are not bad
Use a S.M.A.R.T (Google it) analysis application tool like SpeedFan (free) to give you an insight into the state of your HDD health. It may very well be ok, but without this sort of insight you are just using anecdotal evidence.
I have used S.M.A.R.T. monitors in the past, thanks for the reminder. One problem I have is intrepreting the results. Have you found a good web page that describes the results in detail? I attached the png of my data drive.
This data drive was put in service in 11/2009, a little over 6 years ago. I turn it on roughly once/day. On this drive, I see Power Cycle Count value 100, RAW 77D (hex for 1917), which is roughly 5.25 years, very close to reality. That tells me RAW value is what I should be looking at.
My feeling is the most important parameter is Uncorrectable Sector Count. My RAW value is 0. This is a good excercise, but, my intrepretation is I have no real problems with this drive. I don't see any weird documents, photos or hear any weird sounds on this data disk. The only weirdness I see is in TI.
What I would like to see is Acronis put additional ECC data in the TIB file that could correct most errors. Hard drives are inexpensive, so we have the space for the extra data. I feel having a TIB file that can be restored nearly 100% of the time is more valuable than saving disk space.
Hi Norm,
Are you taking your backup images from within Windows or via the offline recoverable media? I agree, that the Windows version should do everything that the offline version should, but I find that is not always the case. The offline recovery images I create are always usable, but the online Acronis Windows images, do seem to get corrupted somewhere down the line - perhaps not for years, sometimes in a matter of months. I don't know if this is a Windows issue, Acronis issue, or third party issue - there as so many variables from system to system and things like Antivirus tools, undetected malware, or other background issues within Windows can be part of the problem (permissions, services not running correctly, updates, patches, etc). However, I've found this to be a problem, not just in Acronis, but other competing backup products as well - at some point in time, the internal database just doesn't keep up and things start to get wonky or unreliable. As a result, personally, I have gotten in the habit of taking a weekly offline full system image of my OS and I have had 100% success recovering those whenver needed. This might be overkill for some, but it is the only way I truly feel comfortable with any of my offline backups images, Acronis or otherwise as they have never let me down.
If you restore an image, it is possible that the Acronis data about the state of the backup is out of sync, compared with the archives actually available. For example, with older versions, when you restored an image, Acronis wouldn't account for the last backup archive (that was restored). That bug was fixed, I believe in older versions.
After a restore, I recommend to start new backup tasks in an empty directory.
I always do standalone backups. I like to have all files closed and don't want things to change whle the backup is taking place (new email get delivered, antivirus/windows auto updates...
I really like this bootable usb3 hard drive scheme see https://forum.acronis.com/forum/110893 (start at the last message). It quickly boots TI, allows me to make 2 backups, one on my internal 750gb drive and on my usb3 1tb backup drive.