Just bought Ghost 15. It says on the box "Includes ... Incremental backup". But I'm blowed if I can find out how to specify it - and the Help files and the rest are no help at all. Surely i'm not that stupid. Can anyone help?
I should have said - its an Incremental "Files and Folders" backup that I am tryiong to set up.
I wouldn't recommend File and Folder Backup, but instead image the whole drive. See THIS EXCELLENT POST by Allen M for reasons why.
If you run incremental backup images (Backup My Computer), it is actually much faster and easier to restore files / folders with Recovery Point Browser than using File and Folder Backup.
BampaOwl wrote:Just bought Ghost 15. It says on the box "Includes ... Incremental backup". But I'm blowed if I can find out how to specify it - and the Help files and the rest are no help at all. Surely i'm not that stupid. Can anyone help?
Welcome,
We may have a bit of a communication error going on here. Incremental backups support a full backup. Once a drive/folder is backed up Ghost will only back up those items that have changed when it runs the next time. An example, a full backup of my primary drive is 65+GB a few days later when Ghost runs again the incremental is 1+GB and stays in the range of 1 to 3 GB until the next full back is run. To do a complete restore of that drive it would be necessary to copy the basic/full backup and then the incrementals in order so that everything is added back in order.
Hope this helps
Well, thanks both for the responses. I had suspected this might be the case. I've read that post from AllenM, and it does sound reasonably convincing - but it does read more like "Why to use Image Backup rather than File and Folder backup in Norton Ghost" than "Why to use Image Backup rather than File and Folder backup [Period]".
I'm not a techy, though I've been using computers of one form or another for over 40 years. I'm on Windows Vista Business, and purchased Ghost because the Backup supplied with Vista didn't seem to offer the flexibility I was looking for. Seems that Ghost doesn't either - perhaps I wasted my money. At the least, if I do continue to use Ghost, I need to buy a bigger External Hard Drive - more money! (My existing one is 120GB, which seemed plenty at the time ... but my PC currently has 124GB on its Hard Drive (all in C:).
I have to say I'm disappointed by the lack of useability in Ghost - it's creating issues faster than I can handle them. It started with Ghost telling me my External Drive was read-only - resolved by Norton Support by creating a folder for back-ups. Provided I accept that I need a new External Drive, I have two outstanding issues - perhaps I need to start new threads -
- About 40GB on my PC is taken up by "System Volume Information" - apparently associated with Windows System Restore, which I enabled recently. Now I have Ghost, should I disable Windows System Restore - or at least restrict the space available to it? ... and ...
- I've now run a full Image Backup and set up a Recovery Point Set - but I previously had started (and aborted) the setup of File and Folder backups. Now Ghost is telling me I am "at risk" because the File and Folder backups failed - even though I deleted them from the "Run or Manage Backups" window. How do I resolve this one?
It would be nice to get back to using my PC for something productive ...
I think I've solved that second issue, now I've discovered that I can Customise Status Reporting specifically for "File and Folder" backups.
I'm pretty sure Ghost does not backup the System Volume Information folder(s). There are several things that are not actually copied into the image. They are System Volume Information, Pagefile.sys, Hiberfil.sys, Windows Update files and others. Have a look at THIS POST to determine which ones. Depending on what types of files you have on your computer will give different compression results in the .v2i and .iv2i files. If you have many text files, you will probably see at least 50% compression ratio. If your computer is full of files that are already compressed, you won't see that much of a compression ratio. Keep in mind if you use Incremental Recovery Points, they are very small compared to the base Recovery Point. Also keep in mind that the last .iv2i file relies on all prior files in the set.
To answer your question about turning off System Restore. It's up to you. I don't think it will make a difference in the size of your backups due to the reasons listed above.
Well, I had a look in the file "<Computer_name>_C_Drive001.v2i" using Recovery Point Browser, and it appears the System Volume Information files are there - 13 files totalling about 37GB.
BampaOwl,
It's annoying at present but you will soon have it automatic.
Do you have 124 GB of Used Space in your C: drive? Is your image 65 GB? Sounds reasonable.
The System Volume Information of 37 GB showing in your image is probably a placeholder. You will probably find a pagefile placeholder too.
Yes, Brian_K, I do have 124 GB used on C_drive, but the image is 88.5 GB (it's dickevans' that is 65 GB!).
But I do have lots of jpg's on the drive which won't compress much (I used "Medium" compression.
I think part of the problem with SVI is that I have been doing quite a lot that's prompted Windows System Restore to create restore points (14 of them in eight days) - which accounts for the SVI taking up nearly 39 GB of that image.
88.5 GB is probably OK if you have a lot of non compressible files.
One of the first things I do with a Windows OS is turn off System Restore. I don't like it and I have image backups anyway. So no SVI issues.
Edit... My C: drive image is 5 GB. I keep data files in another partition and backup that partition with data backup software. Not imaging software. Data backup software is nicer than imaging a data partition. The backup files are in native format so you can see that it is the same as the original and a backup of changed files in 400 GB of data takes 2 to 3 minutes. The backup remains synchronized with the original.
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