Thanks for the update. WOW, is all I can say about the amount of actual data you have to back up! Sounds like you need closer to a 5TB plus size backup drive to me, depending on how many backup sets you want to maintain.
If your backup image as reported by Windows Explorer is actually this big, then I can see why there might be problems. Have you tried to defrag your backup drive?
You really should seriously consider a significantly larger backup drive. Do you find that a significant amount of data actually changes out of this 635GB?
The size of the data roughly doubled in the last several months. The data is almost entirely static, which is why incremental backups are important to me. They're generally less than 1 GB even after more than one week of system use.
Not long ago, hoping to resolve problems with backups, I converted the target drive to NTFS. At that time, I did a complete defrag and chkdsk. I'll defrag again just to see what's up. Can't hurt.
OTOH, I can readily understand how a fragmented hard drive might affect the time necessary to accomplish a backup. But, I can't see having a nicely defragmented hard drive as a necessary precondition for completing a backup. What's with that?
Getting a backup drive of capacity more than 1000 GB does not sound that easy or affordable. But, I'll check with Santa. :) For now, I rely on copying completed backups to external drives. Not pretty. But it does the job.
Thanks for the update. I am not saying that fragmentation "should" affect this, what I am saying is that this is an awful large backup image size, given the amount of available space. Let's say that this is pushing the envelope more than I've seen done before.
I thought I had a lot of data to back up, but mine (at about 160GB or so) does not even come close to yours.
Do you run almost exclusively incrementals then?
Here is one suggestion for what its worth (if the defrag does not help). Limit the full backup on this drive to just one full with the rest being incrementals. If you can get one other drive of moderate size then you can use that to store a second full + incrementals. It sounds like right now you are attempting to get a second FULL on this drive and I think your available space is pushing the envelope a bit.
Allen, we're on the same page. Before backups were failing regularly, I'd do a full backup weekly and incrementals daily. I'd copy stuff to manage the free disk space available on the target drive. Typically, I'd have one--maybe two--full backups on the target drive.
After re-installing Ghost, I didn't clear the old backup off the target drive before trying a new backup, because I hate to give up an apparently good backup just now. My backups have been so irregular lately that I'm at the point of not trusting even those that seem to have run to completion. Adding a "verify after backup" is not the most pleasant thought, owing to the size of the backups.
If defragging and luck don't yield a successful backup, I'll not only clear the old backup, I'll re-initialize the target drive.
Thanks again for the update. I totally understand that this size backup takes quite some time but I would highly recommend that you do a verify after the backup. This is what gives the peace of mind that it not only completed the backup but also verified the integrity of the backup afterwards. This is very important. Suggestion: just let this run overnight while you are sleeping. Hopefully it will be done by the time you wake up in the morning.
I was suggesting that you invest in one more drive of moderate size (say another 1TB drive) to hold a second or possibly third backup.
I never like the idea of putting all my eggs in one basket. I think it is always a good idea to have backups spanning some period of time. For myself I keep rolling backups which cover about 3 months worth of time. That is probably overkill on my part but the idea is that things "can" happen and it may not always be the last backup which you want to restore from.
Let's say you were hit with some sort of nasty virus. Sometimes you may not know it right away and your most recent backup might have also been infected. By having more than one backup you've given yourself extra insurance that you will have a non-infected backup to restore. This is but one example.
Allen, your advice, of course, is entirely correct. As it happens, I have three large-capacity external USB drives. So, given successful backups, I can stage things around in such a way that I have a reasonable grandfather-father-son relationship among backups. But, it's been some weeks since that was possible. Now, I often have only one or two apparently good backups. Essentially all my data could be reconstructed from various source media. But, the inconvenience of recovering via that route prompts me to perform regular backups.
I'm looking into moving from USB drives to Firewire or eSATA, in order to achieve faster throughput. But, until I do, verifying backups is not really an option unless I'm willing to reserve one day a week for nothing but backups. As it is, I schedule backups to occur at 2 a.m. When backups were completing regularly, the weekly backup was not always complete late in the following morning. :-(
I used to always verify backups. But, at some point, I began running into false indications of failure (or, was it false indications of non-failure?). I don't recall whether that occurred using Ghost or another product. In any case, the experience soured my attitude concerning the actual value of verification.
Morale of the story: do not, under any circumstances, develop an interest in digital video production. It eats disk space like crazy.
Understood! Just so you know, the method by which Ghost verifies the integrity of the backup image is this. The CRC checksum is stored within the actual backup image. This is computed as the backup is done based on data being backed up from the source drive.
Then during verify, the backup image is read back and as it does so it re-computes the CRC checksum as the image is read. This recalculated CRC checksum is then compared to the one stored in the backup image itself. This is how a backup image can be verified even on a different computer.
The chances of the CRC checksum actually matching the one stored in the backup image unless it truly is good is pretty much astronomical.
If a backup image successfully validates then you are almost certain to have a sound backup upon which you can resore, to the tune of probably 99.9999% guarantee.
I like your idea of eventually switching to eSATA for throughput improvements! You know, hard drive prices are coming down all the time!
Before I switched to internal SATA drives I used to have Ultra Wide SCSI drives because the old style IDE drives just did NOT cut it for speed! Back then a 36GB SCSI drive was well over $300!!
Since then I replaced 3 internal SCSI 36 GB drives with 3 500GB SATA drives and each drive was only $140!!
Just so you know, the method by which Ghost verifies the integrity of the backup image is this. The CRC checksum is stored within the actual backup image. This is computed as the backup is done based on data being backed up from the source drive.
