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File/Folder Backups/Restore

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I thought I was the poster child for making regular backups with Acronis. I have three hard drives. One for programs and the operating system, one for data and files and one to back up the other two. Also have an external drive to which I back up the Acronis backups regularly and store in a remote location. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, my data hard drive went south and I went to my backup archive on my third drive which was only a week old as I was backing up both primary drives on a weekly schedule. It was there and I thought all is well. I double clicked on the file in Explorer and began to drill down through the folders and found that many files and folders seemed to be missing. I had restored some files in this manner in the past. When I went to my backup of the backup on the external drive, same thing. Panic is setting in. Dead drive with 20 years of stuff and no viable backup. Somehow I managed to delete my most current backup of my folders/file drive which was only a week old and was left with only my backup the backup file on my third drive which was a month old but didn't show all of my files and folders in Explorer. Thought I was dead.

I contracted with a consultant to try and recover the files and folders on my data drive and he is still pulling data off the drive after a week. I am waiting. In the meantime I purchased three new drives thinking if one drive crashed the others are about to go. I managed to clone my programs/operating system drive to a new drive. I'm halfway home.

I installed another new drive where my data drive had once been setting and getting tired of waiting for my consultant I rebooted my machine into my Acronis Rescue CD and went to my remaining one month old backup archive. I started the process of restoring the archive to my new data drive hoping to get back at least some of my files assuming that the archive was corrupt. To my surprise ALL of my files and folders were there (one month old) and they restored to my new data drive.

Hopefully when my consultant calls I will be able to recover the rest of my files for the missing month.

The point of all of this is you should not expect to get a true picture of your backup archive through Windows Explorer. It doesn't show all of the files and folders and makes it appear that the backup is corrupt. Use your rescue CD (assuming you made one) and restore all or part of your files from there. Hope this is helpful to some.

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Robert, thank you for the post about your experiences with the failed drive and recovery.  It is a timely reminder that we all need to keep more than one backup target in multiple different locations along with having tried and tested rescue / recovery media to cope with a bare-metal situation should the worse case scenario happen.