Ghost 15 hangs "reconciling volume" at 1% on incremantal backups

martike · ‎03-31-2009

After running successfully for several months, my new installation of Ghost 15 has started to give problems. I have a backup scheduled to run on the first day of each month, starting a new set, followed by increments each day. This has worked without difficulty until now.

What goes wrong now is that the incremental backups stick at 1% with the window showing “reconciling volume”.

I have to cancel this and then to ensure that I have viable backups I manually run a full backup every day, but I shouldn’t have to do this.

What has gone wrong ?

Note : I’ve seen on other sites and other discussions that this could be caused by running a disk defrag between the full backup to start the set, and the subsequent incremental backups. This is not the case.

Just to remove any doubt about defrags, I did defrag the disk and then I immediately did a full backup. The first incremental backup the following day failed.

Windows XP SP3, Ghost 15.0.1.36526

dickevans · ‎04-08-2008

martike wrote:
After running successfully for several months, my new installation of Ghost 15 has started to give problems. I have a backup scheduled to run on the first day of each month, starting a new set, followed by increments each day. This has worked without difficulty until now.

What goes wrong now is that the incremental backups stick at 1% with the window showing “reconciling volume”.

I have to cancel this and then to ensure that I have viable backups I manually run a full backup every day, but I shouldn’t have to do this.

What has gone wrong ?

Note : I’ve seen on other sites and other discussions that this could be caused by running a disk defrag between the full backup to start the set, and the subsequent incremental backups. This is not the case.

Just to remove any doubt about defrags, I did defrag the disk and then I immediately did a full backup. The first incremental backup the following day failed.

Windows XP SP3, Ghost 15.0.1.36526

Hi,

Can you give us a bit more information? Assume that the source is the "C" drive. What's the destination?

What was the reason for the 'new' installation of Ghost15? What's the size of the destination and is it USB, internal,?

Thanks

Dick
Win7x64 SP1 current NIS V20

martike · ‎03-31-2009

Hello, Dick,

It’s a new installation of Ghost 15, until April I was still using Ghost 10, then I upgraded.

The source is my D: drive. I keep system and data separated.

The destination is an external hard drive. There is no space problem on that drive.

What is puzzling is that it all worked perfectly until a few days ago, and there’s nothing I’m aware of which has changed. The installation of Ghost has certainly not changed.

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

martike,

If you don't get a quick resolution I'd restore an OS image taken when Ghost was working OK.

dickevans · ‎04-08-2008

martike wrote:
Hello, Dick,

It’s a new installation of Ghost 15, until April I was still using Ghost 10, then I upgraded.

The source is my D: drive. I keep system and data separated.

The destination is an external hard drive. There is no space problem on that drive.

What is puzzling is that it all worked perfectly until a few days ago, and there’s nothing I’m aware of which has changed. The installation of Ghost has certainly not changed.

HI,

A few thoughts;

Run CHKDSK /R from the command prompt on the drive running Ghost

Run a full scan from the desktop with Malwarebytes free scanner

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

I'm assuming that a recovery of something from a previous backup went well - to confirm both the backup and the connection

Please post back with your results. Thanks

Dick
Win7x64 SP1 current NIS V20

martike · ‎03-31-2009

Thanks again, Dick. I'll do the checks you suggest, BUT,..... for the last two days it's all worked without any difficulty.

It's just that problems that disappear like that have a nasty habit of just reappearing again !

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

You may run into that problem if your rebooting the system without the external drive attached or if your making a lot of changes without the drive attached. Every time you do something like that and later attach the drive, before it does the next incremental it needs to "reconcile" or figure out what changes have been made since the last backup.

If you happen to have another internal drive or partition you can eliminate this problem by doing all the scheduled backups onto the internal drive and then use the "offsite copy" feature to sync the backups onto the external drive.

Dave

andreash_utah · ‎07-27-2009

Dave is correct. The following technote explains it better, along with a solution. (This is in regards to SSR, which is Ghost's cousin, so you can substitute Ghost for Symantec System Recovery.)

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH58871

-Andy

martike · ‎03-31-2009

Thank you both. I think I now understand the problem, but it is disappointing that Ghost can’t handle it better.

I see that the technical note says that ‘the process is not actually hung” and that Ghost is working on the reconciliation, but I’ve waited for up to 3 hours, and it stayed on 1%, so for me that’s really the same as being hung !

One of the real advantages of Ghost is that it’s possible to define and schedule back-up tasks and then pretty much forget about it. But here we have a situation where that’s no longer possible. If updates have been made to my D: drive at any time when the external backup drive was not online, then there’s a risk that the incremental backup will hang, so I have to monitor it, and cancel it and run a manual full backup if necessary.

I don’t like the idea of double backups, first to an internal partition and then later to the external drive, but it seems that keeping the external drive permanently online would resolve the problem. Is that right ?

dickevans · ‎04-08-2008

martike wrote:
Thank you both. I think I now understand the problem, but it is disappointing that Ghost can’t handle it better.

I see that the technical note says that ‘the process is not actually hung” and that Ghost is working on the reconciliation, but I’ve waited for up to 3 hours, and it stayed on 1%, so for me that’s really the same as being hung !

One of the real advantages of Ghost is that it’s possible to define and schedule back-up tasks and then pretty much forget about it. But here we have a situation where that’s no longer possible. If updates have been made to my D: drive at any time when the external backup drive was not online, then there’s a risk that the incremental backup will hang, so I have to monitor it, and cancel it and run a manual full backup if necessary.

I don’t like the idea of double backups, first to an internal partition and then later to the external drive, but it seems that keeping the external drive permanently online would resolve the problem. Is that right ?

Hi,

That does solve the problem. I use a USB drive for my backup location and keep it connected for just that reason.

Stay well and surf safe

Dick
Win7x64 SP1 current NIS V20