Corruption archiving .rar files to external drives

tgfyhre · 22 Feb 2016

I'm certainly not trying to suggest I'm an authority on any of this. This is just how I've always backed up my important files. To me, it seems to make sense that having a file archived with repair files will assure it will be protected against future corruption as long as the repair files are a reasonably adequate size. I'm guessing most people don't do it this way. I know lots of people use RAID for backups. Myself, I'd rather just keep my files on 2 separate drives with repair files without bothering with RAID.

tgfyhre · 22 Feb 2016

I've been copying some test rar files over but I just can't seem to make any sense of this. The rar files I copy over to the external drives are never corrupted. They test fine. But, if I create the rar files over to the external drive, sometimes it's corrupted and sometimes not. I can't figure out why it isn't consistent.

Layback Bear · 22 Feb 2016

If I may.
Raid is not a proper method of backup in any way shape or forum.
If you concern is backup, which I gather it is, I would suggest using Macrium Reflect.
Using Macrium Reflect and the PE disk one makes you can check the backup after it is completed. It will verify the backup went well or not.

whs, aka Wolfgang has a little tutorial with a video you could take a look at and see if that is what you want.

Imaging with free Macrium

At the bottom of the tutorial their is a lot more information if one cares to look a little deeper into the subject.

tgfyhre · 23 Feb 2016

That looks like a great backup tool.

I still need to figure out what's going on with my rar issue. I've been rar'ing up files to external drives for years and have never had an issue like this before.

Golden · 23 Feb 2016

In WinRAR, check which location is being used as a \Temp folder for the compression process. If it's on the USB device, try changing it to the local disk.

It sounds to me like the temporary files aren't being "released".

Golden · 23 Feb 2016

whs said:

Dumb question - why do you rar the files.

Correct - dumb question indeed. One reason might be to conserve storage space, another might be for security if a password is used during compression. Who are we to query? Let's focus on solving the issue.

tgfyhre · 23 Feb 2016

Golden said:

In WinRAR, check which location is being used as a \Temp folder for the compression process. If it's on the USB device, try changing it to the local disk.

It sounds to me like the temporary files aren't being "released".

Just checked - the temp folder is on my main OS drive, and "use only for removable disks" is checked.

Is it possible my memory could be failing? Could that cause this issue? But I don't get any memory errors with daily use.

I was also wondering as you did if somehow the archive isn't being "closed" or "completed". But I do notice that sometimes the archive tests fail early on in a multi-part archive - it doesn't just fail at the end. It fails part-way through testing, before it reaches the last part.

tgfyhre · 23 Feb 2016

Just tried some archiving again about a half hour ago and it went fine. So several times during the day it failed with multiple attempts, then shutting off the enclosures and trying again later and it goes okay. I can't figure this out. It's been back-and-forth like this for a couple weeks now.

Golden · 23 Feb 2016

No, its not a memory issue.

Do you get the same issue on a single file? How large is the file? How much free space is on C:?

tgfyhre · 23 Feb 2016

Golden said:

No, its not a memory issue.

Do you get the same issue on a single file? How large is the file? How much free space is on C:?

Currently around 60-80GB free on drive C.

The archives fail when I zip multiple files together or a single large file. A large file might be anything from 3GB to 20+GB. Earlier I tried about 15 separate files that together totaled around 8GB and it failed when testing. A half hour later I did the same files again and they tested okay - same drive, didn't touch the USB cable.