⁦F.⁩ Checking the backup

Trial restore

Why

A backup from which nothing has ever been restored is only a hope. A trial restore goes through the whole recovery path: reading from the backup, decrypting and writing the files. It does this on a random sample of files and usually takes a few minutes.

Before you start

  • You need about 0.5 GB of free space on the system drive: the program briefly restores the sample there, in the Windows temporary folder.
  • An encrypted backup: have the backup password ready.

Step by step

  1. In the menu on the left, click “Restore”.
  2. In the “Where we restore from” box, choose the main backup folder.
  3. If the backup is encrypted, enter the password in the “Password” box.
  4. Click “Trial restore”.

What you should see

The “Trial restore” window with the summary “Done:” and a note on how many files were compared with the original and how many only with the checksum.

The program picks up to 50 files at random, up to 512 MB in total; it skips larger files. It compares every restored file with the original, if that has not changed since the backup, and otherwise with the checksum recorded during the backup. It deletes the restored files straight away, also after an interruption.

What next

  • Every trial picks different files. Repeat it every now and then, for example after larger changes to the backup.
  • You check the whole backup with the “Check backup” button (see “Checking that the backup is intact”).

If something goes wrong

  • “the restored file differs from the source file” or “the restored file differs from the checksum recorded during the backup”: see “A check reports changed or damaged files”.
  • “The backup has no files that a trial restore could check.”: the files in the backup have no checksums, or each of them is larger than 512 MB. Run “Check backup”: it adds the missing checksums where the original has not changed.
  • “Trial restore” is inactive: choose the backup folder. For an encrypted backup, also enter the password.