Recovery Point Merge Failure May Render Recovery Point Unrecoverable

What is the issue?

CA ARCserve® D2D r16 Update 7 added the ability to resume the recovery point merge process if a previous merge job failed or crashed. However, since releasing Update 7 we have determined that if a merge fails or crashes after more than 10% of the merge job has been completed, the recovery point chain may be corrupted resulting in continued backup, merge, and restore errors.

Notes:

This issue has only been found with systems running Update 7. Systems running previous updates do not have this issue.
This issue has been fixed and tested in CA ARCserve D2D r16.5. If you have determined that the existing recovery points in your environment have been affected, you must run a Full Backup to a different backup destination to restart the recovery point chain.
Data corruption could have occurred during the merge process of previous CA ARCserve D2D r16 Update 7 recovery points. Upgrading to CA ARCserve D2D r16 Update 8 or CA ARCserve D2D r16.5 will not repair any data corruption already present in existing recovery points.
Data from the corrupted recovery points may not be recoverable using the CA ARCserve D2D recovery interface. We strongly recommend testing multiple recovery points to determine your level of recoverability.

Additional information related to merge issues and data corruption can be found in KB article:

http://arcserve-knowledgebase.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=4032

What to do?

The AFUtil.exe utility can be used to scan your backup sessions and confirm the integrity of the backed-up data. It is strongly recommended that you access the following KB article to download the utility and then run the utility immediately:

http://arcserve-knowledgebase.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=4512

Important! Because this utility performs a complete scan of your backed-up data for the selected recovery point, this can be a time-consuming process. The utility cannot run if other jobs are running at the same time. Verify that the CA ARCserve D2D Web Service is stopped and that there are no active jobs running.

For more information about this utility, see AFUtil.exe Utility.