Norton Ghost 14 Problem with Recovering Files and Folders

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1

I have been using Norton Ghost 14 for a couple of years but never had to recover any files until now. I store the backups on two external USB drives . I use one of them for the complete drive backups and the other for file/folder backups. I recently had a hard drive failure that required me to erase the C: drive and eliminate some bad sectors. Because of the disk problem I had not been able to do a complete C: drive backup since late Oct however I had been successfully doing a file backup of important files and folders on a daily basis. Just prior to erasing the disk to eliminate the bad sectors I did another file backup on Dec 6. At that point Norton Ghost recognized all the file backups when viewing the 'Status.' My thinking was I could recover the C: drive with the October backup then after completing that update the files with the Dec 6 file backup. I thought this would be accepatble since no changes except to files occurred since the Oct complete drive backup.

 

Restoration of the Oct complete drive backup was completed ok using a Norton Ghost Recovery Disk I had created a while back. But now Norton Ghost will not recognize the file backups created after the last good complete drive backup. Using windows explorer I can still see the file backups including the one done on Dec 6 (by looking at the file dates). But, I have been unable to restore them using Norton Ghost. If I do a "Import Backup Destination" from Recover My Files Ghost still does not include all the file backups. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can recover the files? If there were some utility to decompress the Ghost backups I could manually restore the important data from within Windows eventhough Ghost does not recognize the backup files.

2

You restored your system to a point in time before the file and folder backup was done, thats why Ghost doesn't have a history of them.

 

Open Ghost and click the big "tasks" button and then select "recover my files"

On the left click "file and folders" to highlight it, then click: File > Import backup destination

Browse to the location of your file and folder backups and let it import everything.

 

Dave

 

Edit- sorry, I missed the part where you said you already tried that.

 

3

Thanks for the suggestion but I tried that with no luck. I may try it again though as I'm getting desparate. There are some really important files that I need to restore.

4

I recall someone having to first import an incorrect folder and then import the correct folder for everything to show up.

 

If that doesn't work, here is a post from Allen about how to rebuild the catalog from scratch.

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-12-0-Data-and-File-BU-not-completing/m-p/190719/highlight/true#M18307

 

That topic was from version 12 but it works the same way as versions 14 and 15, I'm just not sure if the folder location is the same as in Windows 7.

 

Dave

 

5

Dave,

I had high hopes but still no luck. I tried to rebuild the Ghost database catalog but it still doesn't recognize the daily file backups after Oct 22. When I did the "Import Backup Destination from Recover My Files it ran and ran but then stopped with an error message E4BC0019 "The file import failed. The backup file information in the file segment does not match info in the database." It did, however, recreate the database eventhough it didn't recover the files.

 

Thanks for your suggestion. I'm still searching for a solution.

6

Problem solved. Uninstalled Ghost, reinstalled it, did recover files and File > Import backup destination. Ghost then created a new catalog database and I was able to recover all the files I needed. I have learned a lot about Norton Ghost. Thanks to everyone for the help.

7

I'm glad you got it working.

For what it's worth, most of us don't use the file and folder backup because it's not very robust.

Restoring files from images using the image explorer, or by mounting the image as a drive is so much easier and preserves the folder and subfolder paths.

 

Don't forget you can make a "cold image" from your recovery disk.

I would have made a cold image and then verified that it could be opened and eveything was intact.

Then I would have restored the old working image and back in windows pulled all the current data out of the cold image.

 

Glad it worked,

Dave