A lesson in having reliable backups

hsehestedt · May 11, 2025

I just suffered a major PC failure. After repairs, I went to my Reflect backup only to find out that my backups over the past several days are corrupt. I had to go back to May 5th to get a good backup.

Here is my backup scheme:

Every 1st of the month is a full backup. Every Sunday is a differential backup. Every other day is an incremental backup.

Backups are saved to storage array in TRIPLICATE and a verification is run after each backup.

So, the lesson: Perform backups to multiple locations, NOT in the same location. Even though I am storing data on three separate drives my storage solution seems to have failed me and corrupted all 3 copies somehow (still not sure how). This is especially weird since I always perform a verification after backup.

Ghot · May 11, 2025

hsehestedt said:
I went to my Reflect backup only to find out that my backups over the past several days are corrupt. I had to go back to May 5th to get a good backup.

I'm guessing the "major PC failure" is what corrupted your backups.
But, you make an excellent point.

Side note: I still have my pre-24H2 backup, from Sept. 2024.

hsehestedt · May 11, 2025

Ghot said:
I'm guessing the "major PC failure" is what corrupted your backups.

It's a possibly, although everything else seems to be intact so far.

gunrunnerjohn · May 12, 2025

Given that all the other data seems intact but the backups are corrupt, I'd be looking at the backup solution as a possibility.

My boot partition backup happens weekly and is done to two separate locations, a separate local drive and my NAS. My data partition backup happens daily, and it also is done to two locations, and two copies, one using Acronis True Image and one a file-by-file backup using Beyond Compare.

Tester · May 12, 2025

Was only the OS currupted, or did you lose also data?

RD Mercer · May 12, 2025

I know this probably isn't the way most would like to backup, but this has been working for me. I clone my drive/drives to another drive now, been doing this for a couple years. You can purchase a m.2 and a regular stand alone sata cloner fairly cheap now, as well as the drives.

hsehestedt · May 12, 2025

Tester said:
Was only the OS currupted, or did you lose also data?

I perform a separate backup of data, copying it to 3 different systems, 2 UFDs, and 1 cloud service, plus a daily Macrium Reflect backup. I take zero chances with that data.

kelper · May 12, 2025

I hope you figure out what happened. Are your external disks always disconnected when you are not backing up or restoring?

My USB SSD by Crucial somehow became unreadable. I did not investigate but just wiped it and started over. I was was in drawer near my router but I thought SSDs were not affected by small magnetic fields?

hdmi · May 12, 2025

As much as I hate to rub it in and be the party pooper (again), I have posted about this particular subject probably more than a dozen times in the past. Backup SSD

hdmi · May 12, 2025

kelper said:
I hope you figure out what happened.

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hsehestedt · May 12, 2025

kelper said:
I hope you figure out what happened. Are your external disks always disconnected when you are not backing up or restoring?

My USB SSD by Crucial somehow became unreadable. I did not investigate but just wiped it and started over. I was was in drawer near my router but I thought SSDs were not affected by small magnetic fields?

No. I perform my backups to an array of five 8TB drives using Macrium Reflect. I use that same array for other things as well, so it remains connected and turned on most of the time. All backups are stored in triplicate (to 3 separate drives).

gunrunnerjohn · May 12, 2025

kelper said:
I hope you figure out what happened. Are your external disks always disconnected when you are not backing up or restoring?

My USB SSD by Crucial somehow became unreadable. I did not investigate but just wiped it and started over. I was was in drawer near my router but I thought SSDs were not affected by small magnetic fields?

I seriously doubt that any magnetic fields were responsible for the data loss. FLASH memory of any type that I'm aware of is not affected by magnetic fields. I suppose a super strong magnetic field might physically damage something on the electronic boards, but even that is extremely unlikely. The whole risk of magnetic fields affecting a modern disk drive, be it rotating memory or FLASH memory is way overblown, I'd even say it's close to a total myth.

A few years ago this discussion came up and I performed a little experiment for a group of friends to assuage the impression that magnets were dangerous to disk drives. I had a 1TB drive that I was retiring from active duty, so I did a little experiment. I took a 2"x1"x.5" Neodymium magnet from a wind generator and rubbed it all over the drive, front and back, and even on the electronic board. The magnet is strong enough that if you stick it on a flat surface like a toolbox, you have to slide it to the edge to remote it, there's no way you're lifting it off the surface. The spec's of the magnet claim it'll lift 100 pounds.

After a minute or two of that process, I reconnected the disk drive. All the data was intact and the drive operated perfectly. I recently did the same thing to a 256GB SSD, again a drive that was being retired. Again, no data was lost, absolutely no change in any data, and it's SMART readout remained exactly the same.

kelper · May 12, 2025

Is this array a NAS? Surely it is unsafe to have your backup drives always connected? Could this be why all your backups got corrupted? Do you suspect a bug or malware?

kelper · May 12, 2025

Chacun à son goût as we say in Yorkshire.

Stigg · May 13, 2025

I have 3 image backup applications that all run on a schedule. My schedules are Monthly FULL backups, and weekly DIFFERENTIAL backups.

They all backup to my secondary internal drive, then Bvckup 2 replicates those backups onto my tertiary internal drive. So, I always have two internal backup / storage drives with the same backups on all my desktop computers. My laptop is the same as the desktops, but without the Bvckup 2 replication onto a tertiary drive. It's all automated. I also make some manual backups from time to time as needed.

My 3 image backup applications in order of preference are:

TeraByte Image For Windows (A component of TeraByte Drive Image Backup And Restore Suite)
Drive Snapshot
Macrium Reflect

pietcorus2 · May 13, 2025

1. Macrium ( latest )
2. AoMEI ( latest)
3.Hasleo ( latest)

Every 5 days , on several ext. HDDs .
Never failed ( so far........) :wink:

jimbo45 · May 13, 2025

kelper said:
Chacun à son goût as we say in Yorkshire.

I think I know another nice Yorkshire saying -- nothing about whippets though !!! more suited for Politicians -- involves wind, male bodily fluids etc etc !!!!

Don't worry our politicians are just as bad as yours (or seemingly everybody else's currently) !!!!!

At least even here weather is lovely. -- Balmy 12 deg sun - and late sunset 22.30 !!!!

Anyway back to the point :

I simply save the system (I have all Windows physical systems on physical vhdx files) so I just save to any available external device the vhdx file(s). --Simple, no 3rd party software required.

Data saving / archiving is a whole different matter but imaging the system is so easy - anybody can and should do it.

I'd recommend ANYBODY if / when they have to install Windows Clean / fresh to use physical vhdx files, keep the OS small and all other user datta on different disks / partitions.

I think also backup should definitely be split into "archiving" - i.e data such as ripped music / other saved multi-media which is essentially invariate, actual data backup i.e stuff you are creating / currently working on or changes regularly - e.g stock market data for instance, and imaging i.e saving the system / OS.

All 3 require very different handling strategies -and with cloud services more secure robust and cheap that could also be part of the mix.

Cheers
jimbo

gunrunnerjohn · May 13, 2025

Not sure how a VHDX file is better than a real backup application image that you can restore using the companion recovery boot USB drive. If Windows totally crashes, you still have to get the data back on the boot drive. Also, a VHDX file is much larger than a compressed backup image from an application like Acronis TI (or many other backup apps). Since I've been using Acronis for years, and have actually used the restore feature many times, I know it works well. Tell me why you'd pick a VHDX over a real backup utility?

kelper · May 13, 2025

Use Case	`.vhdx`	Macrium Reflect
Bootable system recovery
Virtual machine compatibility
Compression and efficiency
Incremental backups
Restore to different hardware
File-level recovery
Ease of use and scheduling

I'm also interested in why anybody prefers a vhdx file to a disk image.

hsehestedt · May 13, 2025

kelper said:
Is this array a NAS? Surely it is unsafe to have your backup drives always connected? Could this be why all your backups got corrupted? Do you suspect a bug or malware?

It's just an external storage box that holds 5 disks attached to the PC via USB. The disks have no special formatting - just plain NTFS. As a result, any one or more of these disks can be removed from the enclosure and attached to any Windows PC and be perfectly readable with no special software.

kelper said:
I'm also interested in why anybody prefers a vhdx file to a disk image.

I don't backup to VHDs but one logical reason is because a VHD or VHDX can be instantly booted. So where rapid access to your data after an "event" is needed, that makes an attractive option.

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Chacun à son goût as we say in Yorkshire.

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