Acronis Problem or Hardware Problem ??

I use Acronis Home TI 2011 and my usage is pretty simple. This is a Dell XPS Laptop running Vista Home Premium - nothing complicated going on. My internet connection is via a Netgear Router to a cable modem, print via a USB attach printer, etc. Pretty simple.

My backup habits are to do a 'full system' backup to a WD portable harddrive maybe once per month (via Acronis, of course). This is always a 'fresh archive' off a 'fresh boot'. And a couple times per week I do an incremental backup of 'the data that I care about' (to a separate archive). I have always been pretty religious about doing a 'backup validation' after each backup step. But I admit that after having done 50+ of these without a detected problem I might have been (MAYBE) a bit sloppy - not sure.

A few days ago I did a 'fresh archive, full system backup' without a problem. The validation failed. So I repeated the backup and the validation was fine.

About a day later I was wondering so I did another validiation and the validation failed (I apologize here - I did not record the exactly failure but it was something like an inability to read some file).

So I went to Vista and went to the drive and to Properties-> Tools and did the 'Chkdsk' function that is available off properties from this point (I checked both the 'file system' option and the 'scan for sector' option). It finished and reported that it had fixed some problems.

I did a couple of archive validation steps and they were fine.

So I just today did a new incremental backup and it was seemingly fine, but the validation step failed. So I repeated the Chkdsk thing (by ExternalDrive -> Properties -> Tools -> Chkdsk UI again checking both scan/fix options. It takes a long time but it finished again reporting that 'problems had been fixed'. But I noticed that it said that affected files would be put in a folder named 'Found'. My external drive has no such folder. Hmmm.

So I repeated the incremental backup step and this time I got a relatively immediate message that 'the backup is corrupted'.

So I believe that I have a serious backup problem here (it would appear the Acronis will not reliably back up to my WD USB hardrive). But Windows Chkdsk seems to think that all (from a drive hardware/software perspective) is fine (I guess). Acronis is clearly broken. Or maybe it is my hardware or OS.

Where should I go from here? Thanks.

dave

ps. I should have added this. The last time that I did the 'Chkdsk' thing, I 'saved' the results. They are not 'copy/paste' able but they do not report having actually changed anything.