Wednesday, December 16, 2015

How reliable is your backup?



Owning a PC for so many years, I've always followed what is considered a good practice for backing up files.

You'd think that Microsoft has a good reliable backup/restore tool. You'd think that after close to 20 years of a company this big being in business, a simple backup/restore tool would have your back in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, that's not the case. A backup is only guaranteed compatibility as far as that version of windows (excluding service packs/updates). A backup is not even covered by their technical support.


Windows 10 

Judging by the issue error that I received below (Windows 10); it seems that a new version of windows is unable to read the catalog from an older back up (Vista) in this case. It might be a bit unrealistic to expect another tool to cover these kind of cases, but seriously, how complicated is backup/restore ? compression and copying of files?


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Windows Backup
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Windows was not able to load the selected backup for the following reason:


There is a problem with the backup catalog. Restore from a different backup or create new, full backup. (0x810000E5)


Verify that this location is valid and try again, or consider choosing a different backup.
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OK  
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Norton System Work 360

Another older backup that I had was performed using NSW 360. I am not impressed as well with the quality of recovery tool. Apparently if you have an issue during the backup process with any of the files, Norton will inform you of a successful completion even though your backup might be partially corrupt.

Luckily, I was able to find a way around it in one of the technical support forums/chats http://community.norton.com/forums/succesful-recovery-corrupted-norton-360-backup-and-restore-set

I have to admit, even though the backup tool it's self is described as "Unreliable and childish" by some of the community users online. The technical support staff in Symantec is courteous and helpful to their max ability; after all they are L1 customer service, they don't write these apps, they are thrown under the buss to support them with what ever tools they are given.

The reason I say this is because my NSW360 subscription was expired, and I was given a free renewal for 2 days in order to restore my files.

Using the arestore.exe and arestore.loc files (feel free to download them), - Norton Portable Restore- I was able to run a manual restore as you can see below

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