I'm in the process of switching from Retrospect to Acronis TruImage as my primary backup utility, and today I spent a bit of time over on the TruImage message boards.
Seems there has been a lot of frustration expressed over the fact that backing up to external drives over USB2 can be dangerous in the sense that if there is a single bit error over the span of a 20GB file collection, the entire backup is trashed.
Many of the respondents on that board mention that they can verify this by running an MD5 ("CRC-like") check on the original files, and then running a second check on the files after transfer over USB2. They've found lots of instances where a very large file changes. Significantly, they did NOT find any corruption if they used Firewire.
Since we're in a similar situation here with single files commonly measuring over 10GB, I suspect something similar could be happening here. But I wonder what a single bit error in a large m2t file would do. Hopefully there would just be a glitch of some sort in the image, perhaps lasting for 15 frames? I really don't know.
Seems there has been a lot of frustration expressed over the fact that backing up to external drives over USB2 can be dangerous in the sense that if there is a single bit error over the span of a 20GB file collection, the entire backup is trashed.
Many of the respondents on that board mention that they can verify this by running an MD5 ("CRC-like") check on the original files, and then running a second check on the files after transfer over USB2. They've found lots of instances where a very large file changes. Significantly, they did NOT find any corruption if they used Firewire.
Since we're in a similar situation here with single files commonly measuring over 10GB, I suspect something similar could be happening here. But I wonder what a single bit error in a large m2t file would do. Hopefully there would just be a glitch of some sort in the image, perhaps lasting for 15 frames? I really don't know.