Solved Verifying Backup and Restore

Bree · May 9, 2022

Wynona said:
Wow! This machine came with Windows 10 Pro. I dual boot, and for some reason, I seem to have installed Windows 11 Home!

So, it seems I won't have to deal with Hyper-V since it's not available in my Windows 11 partition. I know there are ways to install Hyper-V in Windows 11 Home, but I'm not going there.

As cereberus said, your machine's digital licence for Pro will also activate Home. If you really want 11 Pro then, as your PC has a Pro digital licence, you can upgrade from 11 Home to 11 Pro just by changing the installed key to the generic Pro key.

Wynona · May 9, 2022

Bree said:
As cereberus said, your machine's digital licence for Pro will also activate Home. If you really want 11 Pro then, as your PC has a Pro digital licence, you can upgrade from 11 Home to 11 Pro just by changing the installed key to the generic Pro key.

Actually, since I create tutorials on this machine, it's probably best that I leave it on Home.

Bree · May 10, 2022

Wynona said:
Actually, since I create tutorials on this machine, it's probably best that I leave it on Home. :)

That makes sense.

jimbo45 · May 10, 2022

Bree said:
That makes sense.

For tutorials unless you know specifically what your students devices have installed and what levels of the OS or have specified certain software is required for your course e.g if giving a spreadsheet course you will need EXCEL of at least 2010 level is to use the "Lowest common denominator" even if that means using stuff you would never use yourself -- in my case for example using the EDGE browser and say Notepad instead of Word or even Wordpad.

I still keep EXCEL 2010 (and office 2010) around for just that very thing - it's amazing how many people are still using Office 2010 - but unless you really do need all the latest wizzes and bangs Office 2010 is perfectly capbable even today of doing typical "Officy" stuff that would satisfy most people.

What I'd love is for Ms to allow say a "Tutors" license for Windows where I could give a number of students their own VM for the course so that for things needing re-boots etc everyone would be "on the same page". With W2K3 server (Windows 2003 server) you got 4 free seats so the idea of free access for a short while wouldn't lose Ms any money in this scenario - ay you limited the course to 6 participants.

Cheers
jimbo

cereberus · May 10, 2022

jimbo45 said:
For tutorials unless you know specifically what your students devices have installed and what levels of the OS or have specified certain software is required for your course e.g if giving a spreadsheet course you will need EXCEL of at least 2010 level is to use the "Lowest common denominator" even if that means using stuff you would never use yourself -- in my case for example using the EDGE browser and say Notepad instead of Word or even Wordpad.

I still keep EXCEL 2010 (and office 2010) around for just that very thing - it's amazing how many people are still using Office 2010 - but unless you really do need all the latest wizzes and bangs Office 2010 is perfectly capbable even today of doing typical "Officy" stuff that would satisfy most people.

What I'd love is for Ms to allow say a "Tutors" license for Windows where I could give a number of students their own VM for the course so that for things needing re-boots etc everyone would be "on the same page". With W2K3 server (Windows 2003 server) you got 4 free seats so the idea of free access for a short while wouldn't lose Ms any money in this scenario - ay you limited the course to 6 participants.

Cheers
jimbo

@Wynona is tutoring pensioners at her local community in basics. Each attendee has their own pc.

She really does not need to get into full style tutor mode.

People keep advising her what to do without understanding her target audience. I know you mean well, but she does know what she is doing - as they say on her side of Pond "This is not her first rodeo".

To paraphrase you recently in reverse, Brit expression

Courses for horses.

Here the horses are 2yr old fledglings with very basic experience level, and course is targeted at basics with strong emphasis on importance of backups, safe surfing (including recognising scams).

Wynona · May 10, 2022

jimbo45 said:
For tutorials unless you know specifically what your students devices have installed and what levels of the OS or have specified certain software is required for your course e.g if giving a spreadsheet course you will need EXCEL of at least 2010 level is to use the "Lowest common denominator" even if that means using stuff you would never use yourself -- in my case for example using the EDGE browser and say Notepad instead of Word or even Wordpad.

I still keep EXCEL 2010 (and office 2010) around for just that very thing - it's amazing how many people are still using Office 2010 - but unless you really do need all the latest wizzes and bangs Office 2010 is perfectly capbable even today of doing typical "Officy" stuff that would satisfy most people.

What I'd love is for Ms to allow say a "Tutors" license for Windows where I could give a number of students their own VM for the course so that for things needing re-boots etc everyone would be "on the same page". With W2K3 server (Windows 2003 server) you got 4 free seats so the idea of free access for a short while wouldn't lose Ms any money in this scenario - ay you limited the course to 6 participants.

Cheers
jimbo

For tutorials unless you know specifically what your students devices have installed and what levels of the OS or have specified certain software is required for your course

I know exactly what's on their machines, since we began at the beginning and keep our computers updated . . . I make sure everyone checks for updates at the beginning of class so we're all on the same page. Especially since my "teaching computer" hasn't been touched since last week when class was adjourned.

This is not a structured class, but a democratic (not political) endeavor. The students are free to butt in and ask questions when they pop into their minds. At the same time, I ask them questions about things they want to learn.

Our curriculum includes Genealogy and Windows 10/11. It's amazing how well the two classes mesh. I manage the "teaching computer" for Genealogy and use it to teach Windows 10/11.

Since these are all senior citizens on fixed income, I teach them to find available freebies, such as Macrium Reflect, Aomei Backupper, Skype, Revo Uninstaller, Unchecky, Adobe Reader, etc. Of course, Microsoft has some great apps included in Windows 10 & 11, which we'll use if nothing better is available for free. Oh, yeah, there's a free genealogy program called Roots Magic which we use for studying about our ancestors.

You gotta remember that we're all seniors in our 60s to 90s (Yep, our Genealogy teacher is 95 and I'm not far behind her). They're not going to have a lot of use for Excel per se, but if a spreadsheet happens to work with some of our ancestral records, there's always Libre Office, another great freebe.

Wynona · May 10, 2022

cereberus said:
@Wynona is tutoring pensioners at her local community in basics. Each attendee has their own pc.

She really does not need to get into full style tutor mode.

People keep advising her what to do without understanding her target audience. I know you mean well, but she does know what she is doing - as they say on her side of Pond "This is not her first rodeo".

To paraphrase you recently in reverse, Brit expression

Courses for horses.

Here the horses are 2yr old fledglings with very basic experience level, and course is targeted at basics with strong emphasis on importance of backups, safe surfing (including recognising scams).

Thank you, @cereberus.

Nope, not my first; I've been attending this rodeo for around five years now. However, I'm glad to get every tidbit of information, since there can be some gems included. Take this thread for instance . . . I think things are finally falling into place for allowing my students to learn how to verify and restore their backups.

My senior students are definitely like the 2-year-old fledgling with very basic knowledge . . . it's amazing that so very few of them know anything about backups, safe surfing, phishing emails, malware, etc. I get at least one call per week asking, "I got this email and blah blah blah, what should I do?"

Last week I had two students in my house upgrading their laptops to Windows 11. I installed Windows 11 onto a computer that isn't "qualified" for Windows 11, and will visit another student to upgrade both her laptop and desktop to Windows 11. She doesn't know it yet, but she'll be doing the work! :) That's the way they learn, by doing.

yeahyeah · Aug 20, 2023

cereberus said:
My point is these two are really integrally linked. As I said, back in days of optical drives, you needed for sure to verify as the media was unreliable to some degree. I have no concerns about the modern apps such as AOMEI Backupper or Macrium Reflect being 99.9999999+ % reliable in creating the temporary image data - the unreliability factor is the ACTUAL writing to the media.

So I reiterate my challenge to all users of mainstream imaging software - when was the last time you ever had a verification failure (and what media was it)?

In my opinion, verification now only serves as peace of mind, which is fine, but lets not kid ourselves, it is a truly essential activity. I fully accept that if you verify every backup, it will pick up the (say) one case in a thousand you would miss by not verifying. I say one in a thousand as I have literally done hundred of backups with Reflect

yeahyeah · Aug 20, 2023

cereberus said:
Nearly all mishaps are either user error or the media is damaged in some way. Verification is a specific process run after the backup has (allegedly) been done without any error messages. It is essentially like verifying the sha of an iso download.

All the other failures have nothing to do with verification.

So for the final time, when was the last time you had a verification failure, and what media were you using.

a) within last month

b) within last year

c) within last five years

d) over five years (or never).

It's happening to me constantly! I can't get Macrium Reflect's trial version to do a full backup to either of my Western Digital P10 5TB USB drives. It has happened occasionally since last December (a couple of months after I got this Dell XPS 8950 PC), when I was using Reflect Free. But back then I'd run the backup again and it would work fine, verification and all. Those backups were about 650 GB and I was using Reflect Free. Now a few months later, full backups are about 750+ GB, and I can't get one to pass verification on either of the USB drives. They usually fail at the beginning of verification with the error "Index load failed." A couple of times they've made it past that point and "Verification failed at 4% (Block 151078 hash value is incorrect)" or "at 0% (Block 5415 hash value is incorrect)."

Dell's hardware diagnostics detect no problems. I've run the advanced versions of them multiple times -- especially the ones for memory and PCI.

Macrium support, by the way, has been zero help. Although I just recently installed the trial version (which I thought would give me at least one trouble ticket), I was told that since I was using Reflect Free for some months, I've been a "customer" for too long. Oh, and mainly the help they'd offer is for getting it installed and set up. So until I purchase a license to this software (which I'm not so sure of now), I'm on my own.

The problem has gotten worse gradually. According to my Reflect logs, in April I re-tried twice before the backup passed verification. Now it's August and it simply fails every time I try to back up C: and D:. C: is a 512 GB MVNe. I can back it up by itself, but that isn't what I want to do.

I've tried Macrium's recommendation to use ResMon to detect any other processes that are interfering with Reflect; there aren't any. The 2 USB drives I use for backing up to are basically identical and each comes with its own USB cable. I got them last fall and the WD Dashboard software detects no problems with either of them. Verification fails on both drives. I very much doubt that they've both failed at the same time. I've tried each of the 3 USB sockets on the front of the PC. No difference. I've run about 10 of these failures in the past 3 weeks, trying to figure out what's wrong, and I can't nail it down. So @cereberus that's my experience with verification failures. I'm getting loads of them!

yeahyeah · Aug 26, 2023

Update: My problem appeared to be caused by exFAT. I reformatted a USB drive that was getting a lot of file corruption from exFAT to NTFS and it works now. See more at Macrium Reflect "Index load failed" - no other processes interfering

Wisewiz · Aug 26, 2023

@yeahyeah

I just popped in on this thread, and haven’t seen the catalog of pages, but I must admit to being flabbergasted, if all that sound and fury in the above posts about Reflect failing repeatedly signified nothing except that your USB drives weren’t formatted correctly.

TechnoMage2021 · Aug 28, 2023

Haydon said:
Whatever your backup software is, do you verify your restores?

You could verify every backup you make by doing a full blown restore and fully testing the restore. This is very time consuming and perhaps nobody does it.

Going down in terms of level of verification effort, you could do spot checks, e.g. deleting a folder, restoring it from the backup, and inspecting the restored folder.

Going further down in terms of level of verification effort, is not really verification any more, but you could check the events/errors logs, and there is the issue whether you can trust the logs.

There is this anecdote about the IT director who could not restore his backups and was fired.

What do you do to prevent from being fired like that? What level of verification lets you sleep at night?

Every Backup program worth its salt, should have its own routine to check the validity of the backup. Call it "Check" or call it "Verify", or whatever, it will verify that the backup file equals the original, bit by bit. The two files must be bit for bit Identical. Let the program do the work, , , You don't have to do any monkey business of verify the files integrity.
If your choice of backup program can't verify its work, then you're using the wrong program. That happens a lot!!!

TM

TechnoMage2021 · Aug 28, 2023

Wisewiz said:
@yeahyeah

I just popped in on this thread, and haven’t seen the catalog of pages, but I must admit to being flabbergasted, if all that sound and fury in the above posts about Reflect failing repeatedly signified nothing except that your USB drives weren’t formatted correctly.

About a year ago, I think it was at Christmas time, I was gifted a great little 1TB USB Flash Drive.

The works are press fit into a solid block of aluminum, or as they say in the UK "aluminium".
It's totally unlike any Flash Drive I've ever had before.
Having no experience with a Flash Drive of that size, I made a few mistakes. But I finally got it working good, with just two partitions 50/50, and NTFS only.
Since then, I've made sure that all my dozen or more Flash Drives are all formatted NTFS.

TM

Anibor_11 · Aug 28, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
Every Backup program worth its salt, should have its own routine to check the validity of the backup. Call it "Check" or call it "Verify", or whatever, it will verify that the backup file equals the original, bit by bit. The two files must be bit for bit Identical. Let the program do the work, , , You don't have to do any monkey business of verify the files integrity.
If your choice of backup program can't verify its work, then you're using the wrong program. That happens a lot!!!

TM

Normally, what the "Verify" operation does is to check that the image file can be read, and that the read file is equal to the written one (comparing checksums or something similar). No restore, that is, no write operation, is performed, and that is why the "verification is fast, but incomplete.

Bree · Aug 28, 2023

Anibor_11 said:
Normally, what the "Verify" operation does is to check that the image file can be read, and that the read file is equal to the written one (comparing checksums or something similar). No restore, that is, no write operation, is performed, and that is why the "verification is fast, but incomplete.

Macrium Reflect calculates a checksum as it creates the backup and adds it the image. Reflect's verify reads the image calculating another checksum and compares it to the original one. If they match then everything can be read and is the same as had been written.

But you're right, that only verifies that you can get back exactly what you put into the image. It doesn't verify that you made an image you could restore as a complete and working system. Reflect includes viBoot, a tool that can boot an image as a Hyper-V or VirtualBox virtual machine. That would confirm that the image was full and complete.

But for real peace of mind the only way is to do a full restore. It doesn't have to be to a real machine though.....

Testing Macrium Reflect restore using VirtualBox virtual machine Tutorial

When making your first Macrium Reflect image of your PC the final test that the image is full and complete would be to boot from the Reflect rescue media and perform a full restore. This is not something you'd want to risk trying just as a test, so many do not do a restore until circumstances...

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