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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? |
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#2
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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
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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
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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
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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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