After a period of nice, trouble-free use for on-demand, unscheduled backups, mostly incremental, to a 3 TB USB drive, Ghost 10 hung for 15 minutes during an incremental backup which had needed only 1.5 to 2.5 minutes in prior months. Task Manager showed VProSvc taking nearly all of the CPU as it continuously incremented memory use. There was no sound of hard disk head motion. I am using fully-updated Win XP SP2; it has been stable and there were no significant changes in other software before the Ghost 10 hang. Everything else works solidly. I do not plan to install a newer operating system. This is a simple home computer, not a server.
I rebooted, stopped VProSvc using the Win XP "Services" screen, rebooted again, then started VProSvc and tried the same incremental backup. It ran for a few seconds and then hung exactly as described above. This failure is repeatable. Live Update updates nothing.
I was able to make a new Base Recovery Point on two other small partitions that rarely get changed. It completed normally.
From other forum user discussions, it looks possible to work around my problem at the cost of making all my prior backups useless. Is that correct? The instructions for doing so were for a server cluster, using tools of which I am not aware. There was some kind of history file that needed modification or deletion. Is there a way I can do that without server-edition tools? Are prior backups irretrievably lost or can I still get to them using the backup file browser normally?
Other forum users have been reporting VProSvc hangups and memory-leak symptoms from Ghost 10 through the present Ghost 15. Is anyone working on that problem? Has it been found and fixed yet after several years?
I was happy with the functionality of Ghost 10, but if it only works if I toss out my backup set periodically, maybe I need other software. For completeness, let me say that I purchased Ghost 10 new from Fry's in a package with two other Symantec programs, and have the sales receipt to prove it.