Win 7 Backup Question

Four of a kind

I went about creating a system image of my desktop so that I've everything backed up in the event of a serious problem arising.

I left it for a few hours to do its job and when I returned home I found the following message on the screen:

[IMG][/img]

"New bad clusters were found on the source volume. These clusters were not backed up"

I checked the Hard drive where I saved the backup to and the "WindowsImageBackup" folder to there complete with the 350GB of stuff on my desktop.

My question is was this a successful back up or is that folder not usable for restoring my desktop if needs be?

When I choose Restore(in the backup and restore tab in control panel) - no backup is available for me to choose from.

Any help to get this sorted would be appreciated guys.

Thanks.

Fysh

The backup process creates a full system image - ie a complete snapshot of your system at the time of the backup. It failed due to bad clusters being found, meaning you do not have a valid system image, hence no valid backup.

It's hard to say exactly what the problem is, but I would suggest the following:

• Check your drives for errors and repair any that are found.
• Defragment your drives.
• Check the SMART status of your drives (Acronis DriveMonitor should do the trick)

Once you've done those things, try again and see how you get on.

Capt'n Midnight

unless you have malware that's making it look like a bad drive the first priority is to backup the drive - I'd check the smart status before doing any intensive stuff on the drive, doing a sufface scan will reduce the remaining life of a failing drive. If smart is ok the likely a software issue so you can run chkdsk on the drive




if there are hardware bad sectors then two options

something like Ntbackup that carries on if it hits a bad sector ,you can restore over a clean install if you choose the option to overwrite everything
- of course the problem is that ntbackup isn't shipped with most versions of home user windows because it works too well or microsoft don't give a crap about your data or something

the other is to use ddrescue (linux) with a logfile such that it images the drive first and then retries bad sectors - IIRC it's on the gparted live disk


Most other backup tools fail on bad sectors

Four of a kind

Fysh wrote: »

The backup process creates a full system image - ie a complete snapshot of your system at the time of the backup. It failed due to bad clusters being found, meaning you do not have a valid system image, hence no valid backup.

It's hard to say exactly what the problem is, but I would suggest the following:

• Check your drives for errors and repair any that are found.
• Defragment your drives.
• Check the SMART status of your drives (Acronis DriveMonitor should do the trick)

Once you've done those things, try again and see how you get on.

I've just noticed that the past few days - every time it start up windows I get the following coming up:

[IMG][/img]

I tried to skip by pressing any key, but it still goes ahead and scans my C drive. I've gone a make a back up of all my important files/photos etc just in case as it doesn't look healthy to me. I'm not very savy when it comes to stuff like this so I appreciate the help in getting this fixed.

Fysh

Four of a kind wrote: »

I've just noticed that the past few days - every time it start up windows I get the following coming up:

[IMG][/img]

I tried to skip by pressing any key, but it still goes ahead and scans my C drive. I've gone a make a back up of all my important files/photos etc just in case as it doesn't look healthy to me. I'm not very savy when it comes to stuff like this so I appreciate the help in getting this fixed.

Open Windows Explorer, select your C: drive, right-click and select "Properties". Go to the Tools tab and select "Error-checking". Check both boxes, then click "start". You should see a message saying that an error check has been scheduled for the next reboot.

Reboot and let the error check run through, then make a note of the results. This should give an indication of whether you've just got some minor filesystem inconsistencies that can be cleaned up or a problem that might be due to a failing disk.

I'd also suggest grabbing the Acronis Drive Monitor and checking the SMART status on your drive, this will pick up on other data that Windows won't usually be able to see that can tell you if your drive is likely to fail soon.

Four of a kind

Fysh wrote: »

Open Windows Explorer, select your C: drive, right-click and select "Properties". Go to the Tools tab and select "Error-checking". Check both boxes, then click "start". You should see a message saying that an error check has been scheduled for the next reboot.

Reboot and let the error check run through, then make a note of the results. This should give an indication of whether you've just got some minor filesystem inconsistencies that can be cleaned up or a problem that might be due to a failing disk.

Ok, I did as you said and when it robooted it said "Volume is clean" and started up as normal. I rebooted it again to make sure it didn't check for consistency again and it started up fine.

I'd also suggest grabbing the Acronis Drive Monitor and checking the SMART status on your drive, this will pick up on other data that Windows won't usually be able to see that can tell you if your drive is likely to fail soon.

Here's a few images fromACronis Drive results:

[IMG][/img]