mrodby Posted July 9, 2003 Report Share Posted July 9, 2003 Platform: Retrospect for Windows 5.6 on Dell Inspiron 8000 running Windows XP, backing up to an external 60 GB drive via FireWire. The driver for the controller on my hard drive started to put "controller failure" error messages in the Event Log about a month ago, but I didn't notice them until a few days ago. When I ran chkdsk /r, it found and "fixed" at least several dozen if not hundreds of sector errors. The problem is that I don't know which files were "fixed". I assume that the operating system just read whatever it could from those sectors, and rewrote the (probably wrong) data there, just to fix the hardware CRC error it thought it saw. I have had several odd things happen since then, which I've attributed to these "fixed" sectors in random places across the hard drive. Is it possible to verify against an existing backup? If so, when I restore to a new hard drive, I can compare against a backup from over a month ago, and can investigate any discrepancies to see whether they are on purpose or were from controller errors. If not, do you have any other suggestions of how I could tell which files are corrupt, and so need to be restored from an older backup? I have over 100,000 files on that drive in 25,000 folders, so it would be an incredible pain to do anything manually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted July 21, 2003 Report Share Posted July 21, 2003 If you set up an Immediate Backup (source and destination) - then click the Files Chosen button, you can see which files will be backed up. Any files with diamond symbols exactly matche files already in the backup set. Any files without diamond are new or changed and will be backed up during the next execution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrodby Posted July 21, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2003 But won't that just check the date/time and/or archive flag for those files, not the actual contents of those files? In my case, the contents of files could have changed without changing the date/time stamp or the archive flag. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted July 21, 2003 Report Share Posted July 21, 2003 Retrospect uses several matching criteria to find new or changed files. If one of the criteria has been changed, Retrospect will back up the file again. On Windows, Retrospect looks at creation date and time, modified date and time, size and name. What you are looking for is file synchronization (or file comparison)software. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrodby Posted July 21, 2003 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2003 Right. What I was hoping for was to be able to perform the final verify step that Retrospect Express does (optionally) at the end of a backup, without first doing the backup. Apparently that is not possible. Windows comes with a file comparison tool, but it only works on one file at a time. With so many files in so many folders, it would take forever to accomplish the same thing manually. Guess I'll have to go searching for (or write) a utility that will compare the byte-for-byte contents of a folder recursively. I can then restore high-level folders (I don't have enough space to restore the whole thing twice) one at a time, and then run the comparison. Thanks for the suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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