I've been using NG for years. Recently, incremental backups began hanging at 1-4% completion, reporting "Reconciling Volume." A manual full backup appears to have completed successfully.
Product version is 14.0.4.30167. Chkdsk of the source and target volumes did not resolve the problem. One anomaly relative to other reporters: I restart my PC only when required by installation of software or other events. Otherwise, it operates 24 hours per day.
I have given the incremental backup a full night to complete, on more than one occasion. No go.
I have also just updated to 14.0.5.34587, but that seems not to have resolved the problem.
Windows environment is fully updated XP SP3.
I think it's important to note that I have been successfully using NG for about two years--maybe more. This particular problem arose just last week. I don't know of any system configuration changes that might be responsible.
Does it get far enough for the file to get created on your backup drive? For incrementals you should see a file with a '.iv2i' extension.
Did you check events in both the system and application section? Did these incrementals fire off based on a scheduled backup or manual? If you have not tried initiating a manual backup, please try that and confirm if the same problem exists.
You might want to try removing the backup job and add it back in just in case something in the backup job itself went bad in some way. Are there any other background software which could be accessing the drive, such as defrag utilities, etc?
I've been using NG for years. Recently, incremental backups began hanging at 1-4% completion, reporting "Reconciling Volume." A manual full backup appears to have completed successfully.
Product version is 14.0.4.30167. Chkdsk of the source and target volumes did not resolve the problem. One anomaly relative to other reporters: I restart my PC only when required by installation of software or other events. Otherwise, it operates 24 hours per day.
I have given the incremental backup a full night to complete, on more than one occasion. No go.
I have also just updated to 14.0.5.34587, but that seems not to have resolved the problem.
Windows environment is fully updated XP SP3.
I think it's important to note that I have been successfully using NG for about two years--maybe more. This particular problem arose just last week. I don't know of any system configuration changes that might be responsible.
Allen, thanks for your suggestions. However, I tried something during the interval between our last exchange of messages. I deleted my latest full backup and ran a new full backup. Then, I attempted an incremental backup, which speedily succeeded.
What have I learned? Should I be questioning the integrity of my full backups--even when they run to normal completion?
This was going to end up being one of the suggestions if the other ideas did not work out. No I don't think you need to worry about your backups which have completed successfully, particularly when you do a verify at the tail end of a backup. I suspect something happened which simply prevented Ghost from successfully reconciling the differences. Perhaps this was a defrag which ran at some point or something along those lines.
You can also independantly run a verify by running the 'Recovery Point Browser' through the 'Tasks' menu. From the browser, just find the backup in question and load it. Once you have it loaded, highlight the top entry on the left pane, right click and select 'Verify Recovery Point'. If this verifies OK then you are in good shape.
If you want to check your last full backup (in which you saw the incremental issue) see if it is still in your trash can on the desktop. If so you can restore it and run a verify as mentioned above.
FYI: It is not necessary to delete a backup even with the problem you had as you can select to run another FULL backup at any time. Once you have done that, any future incremental will be based on that most recent backup. To manually invoke a FULL backup, you can select 'Run or Manage Backups' and then right click on the drive you want and select 'Run Backup with Options'. On the next page select 'New Recovery Point Set' (NOT Independant recovery point). Once this completes future backups will automatically be an incremental based on that last Full.
I really don't think you have anything to worry about with your backup images. I really do think something just prevented Ghost from being able to reconcile the differences between that and the current data on the HD.
If it helps, I have used Ghost to restore my system drive at least 6-8 times in the past to handle everything from HD upgrades, to HD failures, FULL hardware upgrades, combined OS/HW upgrades, etc. Not once have I ever seen Ghost fail to recover my system when I needed it the most.
Thanks for your help, Allen. In my case, deleting the most recent backup wasn't all that risk since the next oldest backup wasn't significantly older :)
I hope I have helped to set your mind at ease regarding the integrity of the backups. Actually I know someone on the forums here (Brian, you know who you are! ) who has done restores many times more than I. Sometimes I think he does it just for fun!!
You might want to mark the post as resolved by clicking the green Solution link which only you can see. That way others will know this is not still an open issue when they browse the forums.
Allen, thanks for your suggestions. However, I tried something during the interval between our last exchange of messages. I deleted my latest full backup and ran a new full backup. Then, I attempted an incremental backup, which speedily succeeded.
What have I learned? Should I be questioning the integrity of my full backups--even when they run to normal completion?
wbmccarty:
Did you do the incremental backup WITHOUT RESTARTING YOUR COMPUTER?
If that is the case, then you might have the same problem again if you attempt another incremental after restarting your computer.
Just to clarify, the problem on this thread was that reconciliation was getting completely stuck and never completing. If WB has the problem with large incremental or something like that then it should be added to the other thread once that is confirmed.
Allen, Mdubin, I was able to complete an incremental backup after a system restart. The size of the incremental backup was nominal. AFAIK, I have no remaining issues. Thanks again for your help.
Over the last month, I have once again begun regularly experiencing problems that are apparently related to the original problem. Among them:
1. Backups that stick in the "reconciling" step
2. Backups that don't occur but don't leave any trace of the failure; for example, they do not cause any warning to appear in the system tray icon, which continues to report the system status as normal
In each case, if I delete the recovery set information file, I have been able achieve a few days of successful backups.
To reiterate, I used Ghost successfully for years without significant trouble and for almost one year on my current PC. I don't know what has changed, but I no longer find Ghost a trustworthy product. System backups are too important for me to be content leaving them to a hit-and-miss program.
Thanks for the update. Sorry to hear that you are still having problems. Last I heard things were OK.
Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Ghost. If this does not work then running the Norton Removal Tool and reinstalling would be the next step. The problems you are referring to are not commonly reported so I think something may have simply gotten messed up which reinstalling could solve.
I can post the procedure for the Norton Removal Tool if uninstalling and reinstalling does not solve the issue.
We need to uninstall Ghost and then run the Norton Removal Tool to ensure that all the entries related to Ghost are completely removed from the system registry. Please NOTE that this removes ALL Symantec products so be sure to have your license keys ready as you will need to reinstall all your Symantec software products.
First uninstall Ghost through the Conventional means through Add/Remove Programs. Once done please download the Norton Removal Tool from Symantec from this link.
Run the Norton Removal Tool and once it is completed, please reboot your computer. Once up please run the Removal Tool one more time and once again reboot.
Then please reinstall all your Symantec products and download all updates to them.
Allen, thanks for the advice, tool, and instructions. I removed and re-installed Ghost accordingly. I then successfully created an independent recovery set on a spare external drive. Subsequently, I tried to make a regular recovery set. The task ran for hours and seemed to be proceeding normally. But, when I checked the PC this morning, Ghost reports I'm at risk and I find that no backup file was created. The "status" screen shows no record of the task, good or bad.
How does one determine what sort of error caused Ghost to fail? I've long been frustrated by the absence of detailed information on task status. Presumably, I just haven't known where to look.
I concede that it's possible that the task ran out of disk space, since I am reluctant to delete old recovery sets until I can establish that Ghost is working reliably. By my calculation, the 1000 GB drive to which I perform backups should have had 40GB of headroom. But, of course, such calculations are less than fully reliable.
Thanks for the update. Was the last backup which failed a FULL or INCREMENTAL backup? From your description it sounds like a full. You mentioned having around 40GB of free space on the backup drive. This sounds really low. What is the nominal size of your typical FULL backup? Also, what compression level are you using for this backup?
Allen, not 40GB of free space. About 40 GB above the 450GB a typical backup should require. That is, about 500 GB of free space.
Since I hadn't yet established a recovery set basis, the failed backup would presumably have been a full backup. But, I don't find any mention of the attempt in the Ghost console. Possibly, I simply don't know where to look.
I do all backups with the highest level of compression.
Again, despite all this, it's a reasonable guess that the backup failed owning to lack of disk space. But, I don't know how to determine the cause of a failure. As far as I can tell, Ghost merely reports that I'm at risk, without giving me any information about the attempted backup or its reason for failure. Presumably, Ghost will try again tonight and fail once again.
But now I am confused about something else. You said 500GB free and indicated that the typical backup should require 450GB. Can you confirm this?
I find it highly unlikely that a backup would actually require 450GB of space on your backup drive. Is this 450GB referring to the actual size of your source drive? If so, the number you should really be looking at is how much of that 450 GB is actually in use?
Can you check something in your backup configuration? Please edit the settings on your backup job and on the Options page please click Advanced. What do you have checked there on the Advanced Options page?
Also, please check your last full backup which did complete and tell me the actual size it takes up on your backup drive as reported by Windows Explorer.
Allen, the size of my backups has grown recently. This might be a factor in the new behavior of Ghost.
The source drive is, at the moment, at 635 GB of 1000 GB capacity. More or less consistent with that, the independent recovery set that I recently created has a size of just over 490 GB. [I could wish for a higher level of compression and generally consider 2:1 a reasonable result. But, I haven't investigated the unexpectedly low level of compression achieved by Ghost. It may be that a fair amount of the stored data is already compressed. So, Ghost's performance in this regard may be nominal.]
All the settings on the Advanced Options page of my default backup task are currently defaulted to the disabled position. Some months ago, I regularly used the Divide Into Smaller Files option. At that time, my target device was formatted as FAT-32. My current target device is formatted NTFS.
