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Macrium problems



 
 
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  #1  
Old October 16th 19, 07:57 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
malone
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 37
Default Macrium problems


A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB hard
drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in a safe place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural New
Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this doesn't
present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long a laptop
will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The router (Asus
DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off gracefully, but just
stops the instant the power goes off. I've been a bit worried about how
this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but so far there's been no
problem. All the files, images, videos and the like seem fine, although
that may be because they were not being used in any way at the instant
of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After the
power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the image was
stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely vanished!
Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty) folder. The only
remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the router, reconnect it,
then I'm able to delete that empty folder, create a new folder and redo
the Macrium backup. We've had two power outages in the past week and
exactly the same thing happened both times. I lost the Macrium backup
image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your Macrium
backup image connected, in any way, to an active network. But, I'd be
very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the Macrium image is
affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS are?
Ads
  #2  
Old October 16th 19, 08:59 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 4,718
Default Macrium problems

In article , KenW
wrote:

A drive connected to a router is not an NAS.


yes it is, although not a very good one.
  #3  
Old October 16th 19, 09:09 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default Macrium problems

On 2019-10-16 1:57 p.m., malone wrote:

A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB hard
drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in a safe
place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural New
Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this doesn't
present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long a laptop
will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The router (Asus
DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off gracefully, but just
stops the instant the power goes off. I've been a bit worried about how
this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but so far there's been no
problem. All the files, images, videos and the like seem fine, although
that may be because they were not being used in any way at the instant
of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After the
power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the image was
stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely vanished!
Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty) folder. The only
remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the router, reconnect it,
then I'm able to delete that empty folder, create a new folder and redo
the Macrium backup. We've had two power outages in the past week and
exactly the same thing happened both times. I lost the Macrium backup
image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your Macrium
backup image connected, in any way, to an active network. But, I'd be
very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the Macrium image is
affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS are?


I do pretty much exactly as you do but I don't leave the backup drive
connected except while doing the backup, about 8 minutes once a week.
Here in Winnipeg we very seldom have a power outage, maybe once or twice
a year so this is not a problem
In your case I would invest in a UPS and keep the router and NAS on it
at all time, this gives you time to do a graceful shutdown.

Unfortunately I don't know why your Macrium Image files get clobbered
and not the other files, Smarter minds than mine will probably pitch in
with answers, Cheers and good luck.

Rene

  #4  
Old October 16th 19, 11:04 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default Macrium problems

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-10-16 1:57 p.m., malone wrote:

A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB hard
drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in a safe
place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural
New Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this
doesn't present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long a
laptop will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The
router (Asus DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off
gracefully, but just stops the instant the power goes off. I've been a
bit worried about how this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but so
far there's been no problem. All the files, images, videos and the
like seem fine, although that may be because they were not being used
in any way at the instant of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After the
power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the image was
stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely vanished!
Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty) folder. The only
remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the router, reconnect it,
then I'm able to delete that empty folder, create a new folder and
redo the Macrium backup. We've had two power outages in the past week
and exactly the same thing happened both times. I lost the Macrium
backup image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your
Macrium backup image connected, in any way, to an active network. But,
I'd be very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the Macrium image
is affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS are?


I do pretty much exactly as you do but I don't leave the backup drive
connected except while doing the backup, about 8 minutes once a week.
Here in Winnipeg we very seldom have a power outage, maybe once or twice
a year so this is not a problem
In your case I would invest in a UPS and keep the router and NAS on it
at all time, this gives you time to do a graceful shutdown.

Unfortunately I don't know why your Macrium Image files get clobbered
and not the other files, Smarter minds than mine will probably pitch in
with answers, Cheers and good luck.

Rene


Someone in another group, was having trouble doing "Safely Remove" using the
tray icon. The root cause, was even though a Macrium Backup had completed,
something called "TXF" was keeping some control files it used, open.
This prevented the disk from being Safely Removed. If you went to Disk Management,
selected the device (row) in Disk Management, you could change the disk status
to "Offline" state, and then the disk could be removed. "Offline" seems
to quietly defeat TXF.

This article explains what the capability is (atomic commit), but I don't
understand how that's important to Macrium -- why it matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

Now, when the storage device is hosted by a router, chances are
that isn't a path that supports TXF. The volume may not have
the same file commit characteristics. Macrium at that point,
probably uses some fallback code it doesn't normally use,
to handle writes to whatever protocol that is (SAMBA? FTP?).

When you use a browser, and start downloading a large file,
if the browser dies, the "half-finished" file normally remains
there. And I don't think that uses TXF. So why is the Macrium
file disappearing ? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless
there is explicitly a mode that says "if the program dies,
delete that file".

Paul
  #5  
Old October 16th 19, 11:07 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default Macrium problems

malone wrote:

A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB hard
drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in a safe place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural New
Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this doesn't
present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long a laptop
will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The router (Asus
DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off gracefully, but just
stops the instant the power goes off. I've been a bit worried about how
this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but so far there's been no
problem. All the files, images, videos and the like seem fine, although
that may be because they were not being used in any way at the instant
of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After the
power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the image was
stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely vanished!
Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty) folder. The only
remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the router, reconnect it,
then I'm able to delete that empty folder, create a new folder and redo
the Macrium backup. We've had two power outages in the past week and
exactly the same thing happened both times. I lost the Macrium backup
image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your Macrium
backup image connected, in any way, to an active network. But, I'd be
very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the Macrium image is
affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS are?


In the past, and to make sure there was enough space to save a new full
backup image on the backup drive, I configured Macrium to delete old
backups to make room for the new backup. It was configured to delete
the backups before creating the new backup. I don't think it was so
much the "Run the purge before backup" that caused the loss of all my
backup files, but rather then "Purge the oldest backup set(s) if less
than xxx GB on the target volume". One backup was huge (I forget why it
was so much larger than prior backups, but suspect I included more
drives in the image than before). To make room for it, the oldest
backups had to get deleted. However, the new backup was so huge that
all the old backups got deleted, but there wasn't enough space in the
drive to hold just the one latest huge backup, so I had no backups. As
I recall, it was my fault in selecting what to include in the backup. I
also duplicate the backups from an internal drive (just for backups) to
an external drive (also just for backups), and I think I added a wrong
drive which was the external USB backup drive.

I wish the "Purge the oldest backup set(s) if less than xxx GB on the
target volume" had an option to prompt me before allowing the deletion
of more than some maximum number of old backups. The backup got
extremely huge due to some ****up on my part, and this option deleted
all my old backups trying to make room for the new huge backup, but
there wasn't even enough space for the new backup. This option runs
rather blindly. However, if I don't use the option then eventually the
backup drive runs out of space and the new backups will fail because
there is no more free space.

Eventually I tuned the retention intervals on the full, differential,
and incremental backups to keep the last 6 months of full backups (ran
monthly), 5 weeks for differential backups (ran weekly), and last 14
days for incrementals (ran every day) to keep the backups occupying
about half of the backup drive's capacity. However, that's at the
current usage of the OS+apps drive which about 20% full. As the OS+apps
drive gets more consumed, I'll have to watch the backup drive to see
when it approaches full usage, and either revisit the retention settings
or get bigger internal and USB disks.

I can have Reflect send me e-mails when there are failed backups to see
when I run out of space in the backup drives, but I would prefer if
there were a setting to tell me when, for example, the backup drive
reaches 90% usage, so I can plan ahead to change retention settings or
get bigger disks.

If I disabled the "Run the purge before backup" setting, then the "Purge
the oldest backup set(s) if less than xxx GB on the target volume"
setting would become safer. Macrium would try to save the new backup
image and if there wasn't enough space then it would fail and I'd get
alerted via e-mail. I'd lose that last backup (or however many failed
until I read my e-mails), have to decide which old backups to delete,
and let the next scheduled backup run and check their status.
  #6  
Old October 16th 19, 11:47 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
malone
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 37
Default Macrium problems

On 17-Oct-2019 11:04 AM, Paul wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-10-16 1:57 p.m., malone wrote:

A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB
hard drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in
a safe place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural
New Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this
doesn't present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long
a laptop will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The
router (Asus DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off
gracefully, but just stops the instant the power goes off. I've been
a bit worried about how this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but
so far there's been no problem. All the files, images, videos and
the like seem fine, although that may be because they were not being
used in any way at the instant of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After
the power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the
image was stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely
vanished! Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty)
folder. The only remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the
router, reconnect it, then I'm able to delete that empty folder,
create a new folder and redo the Macrium backup. We've had two power
outages in the past week and exactly the same thing happened both
times. I lost the Macrium backup image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your
Macrium backup image connected, in any way, to an active network.
But, I'd be very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the
Macrium image is affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS
are?


I do pretty much exactly as you do but I don't leave the backup drive
connected except while doing the backup, about 8 minutes once a week.
Here in Winnipeg we very seldom have a power outage, maybe once or
twice a year so this is not a problem
In your case I would invest in a UPS and keep the router and NAS on
it at all time, this gives you time to do a graceful shutdown.

Unfortunately I don't know why your Macrium Image files get clobbered
and not the other files, Smarter minds than mine will probably pitch
in with answers, Cheers and good luck.

Rene


Someone in another group, was having trouble doing "Safely Remove"
using the
tray icon. The root cause, was even though a Macrium Backup had
completed,
something called "TXF" was keeping some control files it used, open.
This prevented the disk from being Safely Removed. If you went to Disk
Management,
selected the device (row) in Disk Management, you could change the
disk status
to "Offline" state, and then the disk could be removed. "Offline" seems
to quietly defeat TXF.

This article explains what the capability is (atomic commit), but I don't
understand how that's important to Macrium -- why it matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

Now, when the storage device is hosted by a router, chances are
that isn't a path that supports TXF. The volume may not have
the same file commit characteristics. Macrium at that point,
probably uses some fallback code it doesn't normally use,
to handle writes to whatever protocol that is (SAMBA? FTP?).

When you use a browser, and start downloading a large file,
if the browser dies, the "half-finished" file normally remains
there. And I don't think that uses TXF. So why is the Macrium
file disappearing ? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless
there is explicitly a mode that says "if the program dies,
delete that file".

Â*Â* Paul


Very interesting.

I had rebooted the originating laptop several times between creating the
image and the power outage. I would have thought that might have made
the Macrium image "safe".

And I suppose it may be dependent on the type of router?

Possibly a "proper" NAS configuration might not exhibit this behaviour.

But, for anyone who has a single backup image stored in a similar way,
they may like to be aware of this possibility. Losing your only backup
could be distressing in some circumstances.
  #7  
Old October 17th 19, 12:52 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default Macrium problems

On 2019-10-16 5:47 p.m., malone wrote:
On 17-Oct-2019 11:04 AM, Paul wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-10-16 1:57 p.m., malone wrote:

A little off-topic, but Macrium is discussed quite often in this forum.

Every week or so I do a full Macrium backup onto an external USB
hard drive, then remove the drive from the computer and store it in
a safe place.

Recently I have, in addition, performed a Macrium backup to my
Network-Attached Storage device - a hard drive attached to my router
from which files can be shared by all the devices on my LAN.

I have to endure many power outages in this part of the world (rural
New Zealand). As all the computers on the network are laptops this
doesn't present too much of a problem, and if the outage is too long
a laptop will close down gracefully when the battery gets low. The
router (Asus DSL N55U), on the other hand, does not turn off
gracefully, but just stops the instant the power goes off. I've been
a bit worried about how this might affect the USB-attached NAS, but
so far there's been no problem. All the files, images, videos and
the like seem fine, although that may be because they were not being
used in any way at the instant of the power cut.

The Macrium image, on the other hand, is seriously affected. After
the power is reconnected I discover that the folder in which the
image was stored is completely empty. The 80GB image has completely
vanished! Furthermore, I am unable to delete that (now empty)
folder. The only remedy is to disconnect the NAS drive from the
router, reconnect it, then I'm able to delete that empty folder,
create a new folder and redo the Macrium backup. We've had two power
outages in the past week and exactly the same thing happened both
times. I lost the Macrium backup image located on the NAS.

The moral of this story must be that it's best not to have your
Macrium backup image connected, in any way, to an active network.
But, I'd be very interested to hear anyone's ideas on why the
Macrium image is affected so, but none of the other files on the NAS
are?

I do pretty much exactly as you do but I don't leave the backup drive
connected except while doing the backup, about 8 minutes once a week.
Here in Winnipeg we very seldom have a power outage, maybe once or
twice a year so this is not a problem
In your case I would invest in a UPS and keep the router and NAS on
it at all time, this gives you time to do a graceful shutdown.

Unfortunately I don't know why your Macrium Image files get clobbered
and not the other files, Smarter minds than mine will probably pitch
in with answers, Cheers and good luck.

Rene


Someone in another group, was having trouble doing "Safely Remove"
using the
tray icon. The root cause, was even though a Macrium Backup had
completed,
something called "TXF" was keeping some control files it used, open.
This prevented the disk from being Safely Removed. If you went to Disk
Management,
selected the device (row) in Disk Management, you could change the
disk status
to "Offline" state, and then the disk could be removed. "Offline" seems
to quietly defeat TXF.

This article explains what the capability is (atomic commit), but I don't
understand how that's important to Macrium -- why it matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_NTFS

Now, when the storage device is hosted by a router, chances are
that isn't a path that supports TXF. The volume may not have
the same file commit characteristics. Macrium at that point,
probably uses some fallback code it doesn't normally use,
to handle writes to whatever protocol that is (SAMBA? FTP?).

When you use a browser, and start downloading a large file,
if the browser dies, the "half-finished" file normally remains
there. And I don't think that uses TXF. So why is the Macrium
file disappearing ? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless
there is explicitly a mode that says "if the program dies,
delete that file".

Â*Â* Paul


Very interesting.

I had rebooted the originating laptop several times between creating the
image and the power outage. I would have thought that might have made
the Macrium image "safe".

And I suppose it may be dependent on the type of router?

Possibly a "proper" NAS configuration might not exhibit this behaviour.

But, for anyone who has a single backup image stored in a similar way,
they may like to be aware of this possibility. Losing your only backup
could be distressing in some circumstances.


Just to be safe I keep 4 or 5 backups going back a month or so, As I add
a new one I delete the oldest one therefor insuring I always have some
good viable backups at hand.

Rene

  #8  
Old October 17th 19, 02:29 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default Macrium problems

malone wrote:

Very interesting.

I had rebooted the originating laptop several times between creating the
image and the power outage. I would have thought that might have made
the Macrium image "safe".

And I suppose it may be dependent on the type of router?

Possibly a "proper" NAS configuration might not exhibit this behaviour.

But, for anyone who has a single backup image stored in a similar way,
they may like to be aware of this possibility. Losing your only backup
could be distressing in some circumstances.


Macrium has a "Verify" option, which you might spot in the
restore section. That reads the .mrimg without restoring it,
and just verifies the checksum on the file. It's intended to
detect certain kinds of hardware failures.

I had two backups ruined because of bad RAM, and just
out of curiosity, ran the Verify and noticed one of them failed.
I checked further and a total of two backups were "bad".
The file might be considered to be "complete", judging
by the size, but the byte values were probably wrong.

The memtest utility, refused to help me find the single
bad stick, so I had to replace all four sticks. The
memory errors only show up with all four plugged in, and
any other combination passed memory test. With new RAM
in the computer, I haven't had a problem since.

Paul
 




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