ANKulin Posted March 31, 2015 Report Share Posted March 31, 2015 I just restored a corrupted hard drive over the weekend, after reformating the drive, and restoring from my Retrosect backup. I was in the process of making a second backup copy of my data drive onto another backup drive when something happened again and my data drive is corrupted and unreadable. Sigh. I suspect it is related to some BSODs that have just started occuring in the past 10 days at random, though this evening there was no BSOD before the drive became re-corrupted (but there had been one during the night as the second back-up wasunderway). So I will have to reformat and restore the drive again. My question this time is as follows. Can I make a simple copy of my full back-up drive onto the second back-up drive? (by simple, using something like Windows Explorer to copy contents from one drive to the other). I have however assigned the drives with different drive letters (Q and R) so does this lead to problems with Retrospect later as I set up identical scripts for the Q and R drives as I figured I'd get confused with two portable Q-drives (one drive stays on-site, the other is stored off-site and every month I switch them around - I am a home user). Or do I use this snapshot method? I am unclear if it makes a 100% duplicate copy or does something different (again a home user here, not fluent in all the IT terminology related to backups). Given the issues currently being experienced by my main PC, I'd want to do this copying using a different computer, being worried any future BSOD corrupts my one good back-up drave, after which time I lose everything. I only have retrospect loaded on my Main PC by the way. I hope that is clear.. Thanks in advance for the advice, 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted March 31, 2015 Report Share Posted March 31, 2015 If the "data drive" is a member disk in a disk backup set, then you should use Retrospect's "transfer backup" set or "transfer snapshots" method. If the "data drive" is just a Retrospect "copy" of the source drive, then using Windows Explorer will not correctly copy permissions, for instance. You should use Retrospect copy again. (The first type of disk is full of .rdb files, the second type is a clone of the source drive. I can't make out which one you got from your description.) Retrospect will be able to distinguish from any two seemingly identical drive without problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scillonian Posted April 1, 2015 Report Share Posted April 1, 2015 What BSODs codes are you getting? (e.g. 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) Your desciption would lead me to suspect you have a hardware problem developing with either the system disk or the data disk. Reformating a failing disk will not fix it in the long term. If you have access to a utility that can access the SMART data for the disks this will give some idication of their general health. (I use the Linux based Parted Magic for my disk management tasks.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ANKulin Posted April 2, 2015 Author Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 What BSODs codes are you getting? (e.g. 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) Your desciption would lead me to suspect you have a hardware problem developing with either the system disk or the data disk. Reformating a failing disk will not fix it in the long term. If you have access to a utility that can access the SMART data for the disks this will give some idication of their general health. (I use the Linux based Parted Magic for my disk management tasks.) I am thinking the same thing as I recovered the data a second time and now am seeing corrupted directories on the drives again as I was backing up some edits I made this evening. The hard drives are maybe 6 months old (WD Red NAS Drives). I have 2x4TB unitis set up in a RAID 1 Array in a Mediasonic ProRaid 4 bay Raid Enclosure connected via e-Sata. On the first corrupt, I did not have all my photos back-up (the drives contain only photos) and so I bought a 3rd 4TB so that I could go back and work on one of the originally corrupted drives at my leisure, see if I could recover the missing files. So if it is a hardware problem, it was either one of the two 6-month old hard drives (and I picked the wrong one to keep in the RAID array, or the RAID enclosure itself. At this point I am probably going to buy another new drive 4 TB drive, and try to set up those the two newest drives as a RAID 1 array using my motherboard RAID chipsets (ASUS X79 Deluxe Mobo). I will have to open up my box and see if I have enough free SATA ports left and also figgure out how to set up the drives as RAID drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scillonian Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 (edited) Is the corruption you saw during the backup with files you had edited or just random files? Maybe the editing application has a problem writing to the RAID enclosure. Are you seeing any error/warning messages on the RAID enclosure? If a disk is physically failing the enclosure should indicate which one it is. If data is being corrupted because of data errors on one disk it should notify you of a RAID array failure but not necessarily which disk caused the failure. EDIT: Additionally are you overclocking your ASUS X79 Deluxe motherboard? Edited April 2, 2015 by Scillonian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ANKulin Posted April 2, 2015 Author Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 The corruption on the first two times was the disks were corrupted and totally unreadable by Windows (I tried reading each disk individually with no luck). Also those instances appear to also be related to BSOD and sudden shutdowns. The corruption noted last night by Retrospect during the incremental back-up identified corrupt file structures and unreadable data for a number of random subdirectories,none of which were used or edited in any way last night. There was no BSOD last night. Files I worked on I believe were fine though when I first backed them up I received 8 warnings about comparisons not matching up (I re-ran the backup and received no warnings for those 8 files). Regarding the RAID enclosure it is not showing any errors or warnings. And yes the board is overclocked, has been since putting together the rig, 2 or 3 years ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scillonian Posted April 2, 2015 Report Share Posted April 2, 2015 From what you are describing my suspicion, especially as you are overclocked, is that something is failing on the motherboard. Knowing the specific BSOD will help in diagnosing what. The Windows Event Log may also give some indication to what may be failing. If there are problems with the RAID array then there should be entries for this. Depending on the reason for the BSOD there may also be an entry for it in the Windows Event Log. Are you using Media Verification or Thorough Verification during the backup? A failure in Media Verification means the MD5 created for the file during backup does not match the MD5 created for the file in the backup set during verification. A failure in Thorough Verification means the file in backup set and the file on disk are not the same. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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