I bought it as a download almost a year a go. I guess I'll go look on the site, because I think that's where I got it when I reinstalled NG.
Edit: Alright, I've found it, and I'll try doing the backup from the disk tonight while I sleep. Hopefully it won't require any input.
Oh, and quick question for the sake of curiosity. Why didn't you have me verify the integrity of the recovery point of the one I had already made? Isn't that the one that I'm having the problem with in the first place?
Furlock wrote:Oh, and quick question for the sake of curiosity. Why didn't you have me verify the integrity of the recovery point of the one I had already made? Isn't that the one that I'm having the problem with in the first place?
You can certainly verify the one you have . I thought you wanted a current backup. That's why I suggested you try a cold backup.
No no, I do. That is what I'd like, but what I'd like even more is for the weekly backups I've scheduled to not get stuck on 1%, like I originally posted about.
Anyway, I tried backing my computer up after booting from the SRD disk, but for some reason, it didn't recognize my F: drive (USB port where my external HDD is plugged in) at all. It saw every drive on my computer, save for the disk drives and C: drive, as FLOPPY DISK DRIVES. I don't even know how that works. I don't have a single floppy drive on my computer, and never have. As such, this left me unable to back up my computer, as it wouldn't make sense to backup a disk to itself.
What should I do now? Oh, and I verified the initial recovery point I made, and it didn't find anything wrong with it.
Is this a USB 3 drive by chance? From the SRD, if you open a command prompt and type...
Diskpart [enter]
List volume [enter]
..does it get listed then?
I'll try that tonight.
And yes, it is a USB 3 device. Is there a problem with the SRD recognizing that?
Yep. Microsoft does not support USB 3 until Windows 8 (WinPE 4). You need either a USB 2 cable or try different ports.
Well....that's terribly unfortunate. Not sure what I'm going to do about this, since I don't exactly have the money to go out and get a USB cable, especially since this HDD uses a special hookup for the cradle the drive itself rests on. I suppose I can try other ports, though. Hopefully one of them will work.
I've tried other ports with no success.
Also, how can it be that Microsoft does not support USB 3 if I'm able to write to the drive through one currently, just not through using the SRD?
Furlock,
The Ghost SRD is a Vista environment. You are writing to the drive in Win7.
Furlock wrote:since I already have a full backup for this month,
Was this backup created to the same external HD? And now you can't create any backups?
Precisely. They're all going to the same HDD, the external one I bought for just that reason; a backup. Once I create the first backup in a month, every incremental backup will never get past the "creating recovery point" stage. I've let it run for hours on end, but it never got past that stage.
So you can create a full backup without trouble. It's successful every time?
But all incrementals fail.
Yeah, that's the exact issue I'm having. I've never had a full backup fail, just the incrementals.
As a test, try temporarily changing your schedule so that it does an incremental every day instead of once a week.
Perhaps change it to a full image once a week and daily incrementals and see how long it works.
Leave the external drive connected all the time to start with.
I think the problem your having is that in the 7 days between your incrementals you have the external drive disconnected too much and may be rebooting without it connected. When that happens Ghost has a way of not being able to keep track of what changes were made between images. I don't think Ghost was designed to use external drives as a primary location for images, I think it was mainly designed to use them as an offsite copy location.
Dave
Good thought.
Also after doing a full backup image, try doing a manual incremental to see if it works. If so, do another one half an hour later.
Adding to Brian ... during the tests, leave the USB drive connected. Don't disconnect.
Okay, I'm a touch confused here. The external hard drive I'm using for my backups is always connected via a USB cable to my computer. I don't unplug it. All I do is turn my computer off at night when I'm not using it. I'm not disconnecting the drive...ever.
If the drive is not disconnected, then no worries. I was referring to Dave's comment , which is often the case: "I think the problem your having is that in the 7 days between your incrementals you have the external drive disconnected too much and may be rebooting without it connected. When that happens Ghost has a way of not being able to keep track of what changes were made between images. I don't think Ghost was designed to use external drives as a primary location for images, I think it was mainly designed to use them as an offsite copy location."
So, if I'm interpreting this correctly, the 7 day wait between incrementals is too large of a change in drive states (IE how the drive was on Monday of week 1, versus Monday of week 1) for Ghost to handle? Or did I misinterpret what was said? I'm just trying to get this product to work the way I need it to, and I appreciate the help I've gotten so far, even if it hasn't fixed my issues immediately.
Also, if someone could tell me how to delete backups through Ghost instead of just opening the external HDD through Windows explorer and deleting the contents of the drive, I'd appreciate that, too. Every time I do that, Ghost gets angry with me. :P
Follow up post. Would still like to know how to remove backups through Ghost itself.
So, I did a full backup of my HDD to the external hard drive, and had no problems. Incidentally, I had mistakenly marked the incremental back up to every day at midnight instead of noon. I say incidentally because this actually ended up giving me some useful information. When the incremental backup ran that night (the same day and computer cycle as the full backup), it started to run, and I watched it to see if it would freeze up, but to my delight, the process completed fairly quickly. Satisfied, I turned my computer off and went to bed after changing the backup time to noon, like I had meant it to. Today, at noon, I noticed that the process that the night before had run without a hitch was now stuck at 1% as I described in my initial post on this thread.
In the process of typing this post, the process moved from 1% to 2%, though it still seems to be at the same stage of "Initializing - Reconciling volume". It's taken this process over an hour to move from 1% to 2%.
It seems to me that, based on this set of events, the delay/hanging may be caused by the computer shutting down at night. I could possibly test this by starting a new backup (deleting the now day-old one), and keeping my computer on for more than a day to see if it will continue to hang, or if the process will complete as it did earlier.