MrFrisbee wrote:
Andy,
Surely the whole point of backup is that you remove the drive once you have backed it up? Why does your software not "get over" this issue that must be a problem for 90% of your users....
Charles.
Hello Mr.Frisbee,
I can't agree more, in this day and age and with so many different backup media on offer you would think Norton would have anticipated some of these problems at least.
I personally have used Ghost since version 9, things were very different back then, you had to restore your system using DOS! Mind you it worked and it worked very well. Things did improve over the years and being able to run it in the Windows environment was a godsend, but then for some reason I started having problems with the software from version 14.0 onwards!
My own problems have always been caused by backing up to USB drives, either the backups completed OK but I had errors safely disconnecting my hard drive afterwards or the backups failed all together with all manner of errors. At one time I spent virtually every spare minute of every day for weeks on end trying to resolve the issues without much success. I bought 3 new hard drives, 3 new USB enclosures and nothing worked. I was eventually upgraded to Ghost 15.0 free of charge but still I had problems. Ironically performing backups to an internal drive always worked flawlessly!
I now have a new computer and I perform all of my backups to a SATA drive which I insert into a spare bay port caddy on the front of my machine. As I mentioned previously Ghost sees this drive as just another internal drive and so I get none of my old problems with this method. I think where Ghost seems to fall over many times is when the backup drive is removed for safe storage. As Andy said, " Ghost cannot reconcile the changes between the last backup and the data that is on the drive, or lack thereof".
Like you say though, "Surely the whole point of a backup is that you remove the drive once you have backed it up?" I have always done this because my neighbour once had his house hit by lightening and it completely fried his computer! No amount of internal backups could have saved him then. 'Off-Site storage', is a no brainer really!
There should be a way to tell ghost that you only perform off-site backups to a removable drive and tell it not to bother about scanning your drives and looking for those backups at boot-up. I've never once done backups to a schedule, how can you if you remove your drive like most sensible people would.
I did look into the option to enable off-site backups but that seems really dumb to me. The name suggest you can do exactly what I want.., backup to a removable drive and remove it 'off-site'. Not so, you can only do a 'copy' of an existing backup to store 'off-site' which of course means backing up to another drive before hand!
How daft is that?
Oh well, stick with it Mr.Frisbee, it may not be the friendliest of programs in the world to use, but it will no doubt save your bacon one day. I've lost count the number of times I've simply done a restore to get out of trouble. Sometimes it's quicker and easier to restore your machine than uninstall something which might be causing issues, at least your not left with a load of orphan files.
If I can give you one useful tip, it would be to check the 'Validity' of your existing backups using the 'Ghost Browser' in the 'Programs menu'. If they verify okay you have nothing to worry about and you'll be able to restore your machine from those backups without incident.
All the best,
T-R-D