Ghost 15 - Network backup fills memory and fails; local backup works ok

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1

When I try to backup the C drive across the network, it only runs successfully for about 20 minutes and then suddenly starts filling memory, causing Windows to freeze for a few minutes until the backup finally fails.

 

I can backup the C drive to a local USB drive without errors.

 

This is Ghost 15 (15.0.1.36526) on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with 6GB memory.

 

The event log shows the following, but I think it is just a symptom, with the core problem being full memory:

 

Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: Drive Backup of OS (C:\).
 Error E7D1001F: Unable to write to file.
  Error EBAB03F1: Error performing inpage operation.
 Error E7D10046: Unable to set file size.
  Error EBAB03F1: The specified network name is no longer available. (UMI:V-281-3215-6071)

Details:
Source: Norton Ghost

 

There aren't any processes obviously using the memory when it is filling up, but if I use Process Explorer to pause VProSvc.exe, the memory stops filling.  Here's a screenshot after I paused it at 20 minutes, just before it got full enough to freeze Windows.  The "modified" memory is taking over:

 

Memory20.png

 

This is Task Manger showing the state just after I paused VProSvc.exe:

 

TaskMgr20.png

 

Just for reference, this is how it looked at 12 minutes into the backup; pretty normal I think:

 

 Memory12.png

 

I would greatly appreciate any ideas.  Thanks.

 

2

I think perhaps it may be the other way around, the RAM usage being a symptom of another problem.

I see how much the free memory got eaten up, but look how much it's going into the cache.

 

With those errors, it kind of looks like the system gets a problem writing the file and everything gets backed up in memory, cause it can't get written.

 

How do you connect to the network, can you try mapping the network location as a drive letter if you haven't already?

What happens when you use windows to jam a huge file across the network, does it work?

Have you tried it with the firewalls on both systems disabled?

 

Dave

3

DaveH - Thanks for the good questions.  I did finally stumble upon the solution.  For the benefit of others having this problem, I will outline what it was and what it wasn't.

 

First, I had no problem mapping the remote drive, and Ghost was connecting ok to the target drive using a UNC path and credentials.  Ghost was successfully creating the remote file and was sending data for a while before the backup would fail.  Disabling firewalls made no difference.

 

However, in addition to backups failing, file copies were also failing.  I couldn't copy large files from Windows 7 to my XP machine across the network.  I have five other (XP) computers backing up to the same target XP machine with no problem.

 

I found that many people have reported similar problems; there are widespread problems copying large files across the network from both Vista and Windows 7.  For some people, network transfers work, but slowly; for others they fail altogether.  Microsoft has apparently known about this for years and (I assume) doesn't know how to fix it.

 

I tried the various solutions people recommended, without success.  They included:

 

  • Disable remote differential compression; no apparent effect
  • Disable TCP autotuning (netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled); no apparent effect
  • Disable TCP chimney offload (netsh int tcp set global chimney=disabled); no apparent effect
  • Disable various TCP offloading parameters (checksum offload, large send offload); the specific parameters varied per-NIC; my NIC didn't have any of the listed options
  • Upgrade the NIC driver; mine was up to date
  • Upgrade router firmware; I tried bypassing the router instead
  • Increase lanman size parameter from 1 to 3 (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Size); at first, this seemed to lengthen the time to failure, then I wasn't so sure

 

I finally tried changing parameters on the target XP machine, and this "fixed" the problem.  I told it to behave more like a file server rather than a workstation, by setting "Processor scheduling" to "Background services" and "Memory usage" to "System cache".  This is not a universal solution for copying large files from Win7 to XP, since most XP machines are likely tuned as workstations rather than file servers, but for my situation it is adequate.

 

I suspect these two changes actually caused some registry changes related to networking, which provided the real solution.  If someone wants to dig deeper and post the actual registry changes, that would be great, as I would prefer to revert the target XP machine to be more responsive for interactive use again.

 

However, once I had the backups working, I found that the data transfer was only fast for a few minutes, and then slowed down dramatically (about 3X).  I fixed this with one of the earlier recommendations:

 

  • Disable TCP autotuning (netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled)

Now my backups run to completion, and they go at network speed.  File copies work now too.  Here are the two changes I made on the XP machine, under Computer Properties:

 

XP.png

 

 

I hope this workaround helps somebody.  I wasted many hours before I found it.

 

You'd think Microsoft would be making simple things (like file copies) work better, not worse.  Oh well.

 

--  ColoradoGuy