I'm new to the community and tried to reply to a thread on this subject, but the reply button was greyed out, so am starting a new one.
I have Norton Ghost 14.0. I have an external hard drive always attached to my computer, which is my main backup drive. I have a second external drive that I attach occasionally (via USB), that I'd also like to use as a redundant, but not synchronized (with the other backup drive), backup drive.
I've defined the second drive as "offsite backup", but observed that what occurs is that Ghost simply copies the drive image from the primary backup drive, rather than creating another image. This defeats the purpose of having a second backup, because if the backup on the primary drive is corrupt, that corrupt backup is copied to the secondary backup drive. By creating two separate backups reduces the likelihood of both being corrupt.
What I'd like to be able to do is simply have two separate backup destinations defined in NG, without the software having such an issue if one is not connected. It appears NG only allows one backup destination. Can anyone clarify this for me? Also, is there any way to accomplish what I'd like to accomplish?
Thank you for the response. I'm familiar with RAID, but am trying to avoid the cost, this is just for my home computer.
I realize that base + incrementals cannot be mixed up between drives and backup sets. What I'd simply like to do is an occasional drive image to a secondary removal drive. I've created a backup job which only backs up to the second removable drive, but then Ghost seems to have a problem when that drive is not connected, even though all I want to do is backup to the external drive that remains connected (primary removable drive). It's OK that a new base is created.
I'll have to experiment with it further. Other backup products I've used could handle this.
Thanks for the information. Ghost will tend to pop up warning messages any time a backup job points to a drive which is not connected, but these can safely be ignored in your case. You would just want to make sure that you have it connected the next time the independant bakcup job comes due on the schedule so that it can complete the new backup.
If the drive you are removing is listed in the Status tab of Ghost, you can right click on this drive and select "No Status Reporting". This might prevent the warning messages from Ghost but I am thinking it probably won't work as the "no status reporting" is usually to prevent warning messages about a drive which itself has not been backed up.
Otherwise you can just ignore the warning message.
I think it would be a good feature if Ghost allowed one to configure alternating drives for a backup set, so that one backup would be on dirve X and the next would be on drive Y. The complication here is that because incremental backups build on the previous incremental and not the base, Ghost would only be able to alternate between two different backup drives when it creates a new BASE. E.g., even if Symantec added this feature I'm sure it would require that the BASE + all incrementals associated with that base be on the same drive.
I'm new to the community and tried to reply to a thread on this subject, but the reply button was greyed out, so am starting a new one.
I have Norton Ghost 14.0. I have an external hard drive always attached to my computer, which is my main backup drive. I have a second external drive that I attach occasionally (via USB), that I'd also like to use as a redundant, but not synchronized (with the other backup drive), backup drive.
I've defined the second drive as "offsite backup", but observed that what occurs is that Ghost simply copies the drive image from the primary backup drive, rather than creating another image. This defeats the purpose of having a second backup, because if the backup on the primary drive is corrupt, that corrupt backup is copied to the secondary backup drive. By creating two separate backups reduces the likelihood of both being corrupt.
What I'd like to be able to do is simply have two separate backup destinations defined in NG, without the software having such an issue if one is not connected. It appears NG only allows one backup destination. Can anyone clarify this for me? Also, is there any way to accomplish what I'd like to accomplish?