:'( I seem to be unable to back up the G:\ partition on my hard drive to another drive.I can back up the C:\  (system), D:\ and F:\ drives, but not G. I previously had 4 kB of bad sectors, but I believe I have eliminated them by cutting them out with PartitionMagic, then combining to remaining "good" drives.  Running CHKDSK reveals no bad sectors on the G  partition, even if run with the /R switch.

What happens is that the backup seems to work, but stalls at 5% while "calculating remaining time" or some such.  I then cannot get it to cancel the backup without restarting the computer.  I haven't seen any threads similar to this listed in this form until now, and wonder if this is a unique problem.

I'm a complete newbie at using NS&Ror Ghost, as I haven't had any data loss problems to this point; I hope it stays that way, but I figure I better have some working knowledge of these programs, as well as an automated backup plan before disaster strikes.

Thanks in advance for all your help,
Bill Zigrang

Zig,

Are you using a One time backup (manual backup) or is it a Backup job?

What kind of files are in your G: drive?

Brian,

    It's set as a job, with no joy on both "backup now" on creation of job, or after waiting for the schedule to run. I haven't tried "One Time Backup."

    G:\ drive contains:
2 movie-size .JPG files,
a folder with a CD database (?Nero??Creative?),
a folder with ERUNT registry backups,
a folder with other movie .JPGs,
2 folders with several TV-size .JPGs,
several folders of old partitions from a former computer (?packrat??--me?? - it's only   electrons),
a folder with public domain e-books for Palm OS,
the Google Earth setup program,
a folder with Google Earth files,
a folder with registry backups from jv16 Power Tools
a folder for storage of RAW pictures being processed
a folder with an old profile for Netscape browser (similar to Firefox)
the pspwise.jbf file that has to do with seeing files in PaintShop Pro Album , or somesuch.
a .dbf database of labels for an Avery labelmaking program

I just checked "hidden files & folders" and found "VSNAP.IDX"

Are there types of files that will interfere with a backup? Even if within folders??

I've also (besides CHKDSK /X/R) scanned my drive with Seagate (it's a Maxtor) Seatools for Windows "Long Drive Self Test" and get a "Pass."

Hope this helps.

Thanx again,

Bill Zigrang

Bill,

I'd try deleting and then recreating the job. If that doesn't work try it without a job...


Quote:

Start Ghost 10 click Back Up Now click Define New Backup In the Easy Setup Window put a dot in Define a new custom backup. OK click Next in the Define Backup Wizard select the drive to backup. Next put dot in Independent recovery point. Next choose the location for the backup image. Next Compression Standard (recommended). Tick verify. Untick Limit the number of ... Ignore Advanced if you don't need to split the image. Next dot in Manually tick Create Recovery point now Finish

Brian,

   Same result - hangs at 5% "Calculating remaining time."

Bill Z. :-[

To all who are following this thread - the problem turned out to be a faulty power supply. Even though I tried backing up to a different HD, the program still wouldn't work for Drive G:. New power supply - problem gone. Go figure.

Thanx to all who tried to help.

Bill Zigrang

I have been having a similar problem.  Am using Ghost 12.0.  Creating incremental images is taking a very long time.  I am using:

a Toshiba laptop with a c: drive (80gb) running XP sp2
USB 80 gb hard drive (e:\)
a Network attached storage drive
Linksys wrt54g router

C: drive backup will usually finish eventually.
E: drive backup is hanging much like yours was.

Both are being backed up to the NAS drive.  Have tried it wirelessly & direct cable.  Haven't been able to get a backup of the E: drive for 3 weeks now.    Tried deleting the vsnap.idx file on the e: drive and it seems to go ok up to about 30%-50% and then it locks up again.  What's frustrating is that I have been able to get backups in the past and don't know that I've changed anything to cause the problem now.

Wondering if it's a network issue except that the C: drive backup does complete albeit slowly.  Have a powered usb hub on its' way along with a USB Y cable (2 usb A connectors to 1 usb B) so maybe that will help the E: drive.  

Thanks for any advice.

by the way I started a c: drive incremental backup 3 hours ago and it's at 2% and it's still "reconciling volume".  Is this normal?  It's not stuck though.  (Not much network activity other than a little web surfing at the moment.)

still working on trying to get that usb drive backed up.  The Y cable showed up yesterday.  Still no luck.  Am running out of ideas.  Maybe I'll try the new ver 14 and see if that makes a difference. :'(

have you tried this from Command Prompt:

chkdsk e: /r

This will verify that all sectors on the usb hard drive are readable.

Also, I would disable wireless on your laptop, and connect ethernet cable directly to the Linksys wireless router.  Make sure you disable the wireless first, verify that you can't get to the internet, reboot and verify again, and THEN connect the eternet cable.  (You may have throught you were using the ethernet, but unless the laptop CTRL-wireless icon or similar is disabled, you probably weren't.)  Do all testing with wired connection.

Or test with NAS connected directly to laptop, and wireless DISABLED.

Thanks for your advice.  I haven't been able to try it out yet though.  I started another attempt at backing up the E: drive 24 hours ago.  This time by direct cable (wireless is off) and it seems to be progressing albeit slowly.  It has about 55 gb of data to backup (out of total 80gb capacity).  Should it be taking this long? My c: drive backups are not this slow. Last night the progress meter was at about 16% complete and had transferred about 16gb.  This morning the meter is at 0% complete!!!!!  Transferred data is about 21 gb.  The filesize is increasing so am letting it run.  Will see where it's at when I get home tonight.  Network utilization per Task Manager is less than 10%.   I think that when this particular task is done I am going to restart that NAS drive. (WD MyBook World edition 1TB).  Is there a good network testing/diagnostic utility out there that you can recommend?  

There have been other threads on this forum re problems creating backup-images to NAS devices (use search function to find them all.)

One thing to remember is that when you are using a NAS device you are using network protocol to communicate with the device.  It is dependent upon a lot of network settings on both the pc and network devices to optimize.  And network traffic retries, collisions, etc. are common.  

Compare that to using a second internal IDE or SATA hard drive, which is very fast.  Or usb2 or firewire external drive.

Even creating backups to separate pc on the network is different than pc to NAS.  Is the NAS device NTFS or is it some other linux or other format?  I recall some use a EXT3  format.  Not sure what that is or how its performance affects pc's.

See how long it takes to manually a copy a 1 or 2 gb file from your pc to the NAS device.

As a point of comparision, I backup one partition which has 24 USED Gigabytes to external usb2 drive.  It takes about 15 minutes and the resulting image is 13 gigabytes on the usb2 drive (normal compression).

This is using Ghost 12 and Vista.  I had similar results with Ghost 10 and XP.

Thanks again.  I found this thread:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1172938336/0

Lots of tips from you there.  I have my work cut out for me I guess.  I was hoping to use the NAS for my backups.  What I don't quite get is why the c: drive backup works ok and I am having so much trouble with the E: drive.  Am guessing that it might be the power issue for the e: usb drive.  The Y cable might be helping there.   Also, the last time I was able to get a good backup it didn't take this long so something's gone wrong in the system.  I did take Kaspersky AV off and installed Norton Internet Security so maybe that's it?  Maybe the next backup attempt will be with that disabled.  Will check settings.

shendy wrote on Feb 21^st, 2008 at 12:22pm:

What I don't quite get is why the c: drive backup works ok and I am having so much trouble with the E: drive.  Am guessing that it might be the power issue for the e: usb drive.

When backing up your E: (usb) drive, don't forget what is happening:  Xp must first read from the external usb2 drive via usb2 cable into memory, and then it must combine/create sector image and then write it out to the NAS device using tcpip protocol.  There are more external i/o's than if you were backing up your internal c: IDE/SATA drive.

Is the usb2 drive a powered one?  I get the impression it is not.  I personally don't like unpowered ones because the drive must draw its power from the usb2 cable and sometimes that isn't enough.  Also to minimize the power drain, most portable/unpowered usb2 drives run at slower rpm (usually 4000 or 5400) so they don't have the power demands of a normal 7200 rpm hard drive.

Bottom line is that unpowered usb2 hard drives are handy for portable casual use, but not for demanding use (in my opinion...others may differ...)

Is your laptop a new one?  I am assuming it has usb2 ports and not one of the older original very slow usb ports.

And also that the 80 gb usb hard drive is really a usb2 one?

What is the make and model of the usb hard drive?

The usb drive is a WD Passport 80gb.  Probably 2 or 3 years old now.  It's powered via USB.  I got the USB Y cable so it could draw off of 2 usb ports.  I also bought a dlink 7 usb powered hub to use for this so I wouldn't have to use 2 ports off of the laptop.  That just showed up so it's not connected yet.  The passport has a jack for an external power supply so maybe I should buy the proper power adapter for it or see if I have something lying around with the proper voltage/connector.  Hadn't thought of that.  The Toshiba laptop is 3-4 years old now.  (One reason why I'm being more diligent about backing it up these days!)

Thanks!

I would concentrate on the NAS and direct connect (with wireless disabled) to start with.

It's best to have the usb2 hard drive directly connected to the laptop.  Most all debugging FAQ's say to direct connect if you are having issues--mainly this removes one more potential element in the possible chain of events.

Look in Device Manager (my computer/properties/hardware) to be sure that all usb ports and usb devices have power saving options disabled.  Also, make sure that your laptop is not going into screen saver or sleep mode during the backup process.

Just an update.  The darn thing is still going.  48 hours now. :(  Hopefully it will finish sometime today.  It's at 42.6 gb.  If I did the math right that's about 247kb/s and 14.8mb/min  Not sure if I have all the zeroes in the right place :).  Not good.  Am gonna do some research on the WD web page to see what they say about this NAS drive.  What's interesting is that Ghost's progress/performance window says that it is 0% complete and that there are no operations running (so I can't adjust the performance slider).  Yet there is network traffic and I can see the backup file size change.  

I made the mistake of configuring the backup for high compression thinking that if the file was smaller that it would transfer quicker.  I am thinking that was wrong.  So that's part of the issue.  

Question:  since this is a drive image backup will it try to backup 80gb including empty space or just the 52gb of data.  Am guessing somewhere in between.  At high compression I would've expected it to be done at 42gb if it was just doing 52gb.  If it's doing the whole 80 gb then the ultimate file size is about 60% of that or about 48gb.  Is that right?  If so, there's hope that it will be done this evening when I get home.

shendy wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2008 at 11:12am:

I made the mistake of configuring the backup for high compression thinking that if the file was smaller that it would transfer quicker.  I am thinking that was wrong.  So that's part of the issue.   Question:  since this is a drive image backup will it try to backup 80gb including empty space or just the 52gb of data.  Am guessing somewhere in between.  At high compression I would've expected it to be done at 42gb if it was just doing 52gb.  If it's doing the whole 80 gb then the ultimate file size is about 60% of that or about 48gb.  Is that right?  If so, there's hope that it will be done this evening when I get home.

Ghost creates a backup of only the USED sectors/space in a partition. It also does not backup the page file.  A partition of 52gb of used space should create a backup-image-file of about 26gb at high compression, and maybe 30 gb or so at normal compression.  No way it should take 48 hours.  

I doubt if it is doing anything, especially since Ghost says it is at 0%.

Just to compare, today I just backed up (using Ghost 12) a data partition which is 144 gb in total size and 22gb used, from internal sata drive to external usb2 drive and it took about 15 minutes.  The resulting backup image file size is 13gb.

<sigh>  Rats!  Guess I'll kill the job later then.  Why is the file still growing though?  Tomorrow I will:

make sure Norton AV is disabled (I did disable the outgoing email worm protection) last night without any difference in transfer rates.. could already have been hung though)
change compression to standard.
maybe uninstall the AV altogether for now
delete vsnap.idx on the e: drive
chkdsk e: /f
chkdsk e: /r
reboot laptop
reboot the NAS drive.
reboot the router
then try again

Any other suggestions?  Thanks.

Try copying a 500mb or 1gb file using Windows Explorer, from your C: to the nas device and then again a different file from the E: usb2 drive to the nas device.  See what kind of performance and throughput you get.

Get normal throughput working first before moving to testing Ghost.

Search Google and other websites for info on NAS performance and throughput, as well as network throughput.  For example, tcp receive window size plays a big factor in XP relative to network throughput.

I'm not an expert at all on NAS devices, but they should work better (if that is really where the problem is) than you're experiencing.

Thanks.  I don't expect it to ever be as fast as what you are getting.  But it WAS way better than this!  Only major change that I can think of is the installation of the Norton suite and the removal of the Kaspersky suite.  The C drive backup completes ok, but even that seems to be much slower than before at a super quick 7-8 hours!!!  It was closer to 2-3 hours before (I think..would have to check the event log to see.  I might do an incremental c: backup tonight with the AV disabled and see what happens by morning).  Data transfer has always been slower going to the NAS drive.  I moved my iTunes library over there for example and updates go slower now.  I'd like to get it going direct to the NAS drive but if not I will try to make some room on some other drives and do the backup to that and then copy over to the NAS OR hook it up direct to the NAS and do an old fashioned copy/paste.  I should probably just do that, but I am stubborn and want to try to do it through ghost.

Just because I know you care...I found this review.  I don't have the access problem he mentions though. The reviewer complains about its' slowness but I wish I could get mine going this fast.  Speed sounds closer to what I was experiencing not that long ago though.  I'd be happy with that.  I'd run the backups at night so it wouldn't bother me.   Reliability and consistency would be a big plus though!
....

Summary: I purchased this unit in order to run Windows backups to it.

It comes with a 1000BaseT (Gigabit) ethernet port and a USB port. However, the device can ONLY be accessed by a network connection.


The USB port is for adding an ADDITONAL USB hard drive, such as a WD Combo drive, or some such. (Which I have two of and unlike this product, they are great!)


Anyway, I plugged it in and immediately found that the ___mybook__ method of accessing the device did not work without generating errors. (___computer name_ is the universal method for accessing network file servers, which this "NAS" device is.) The errors I was getting were failures to write to the MyBook World Edition II.


After tinkering around with things, I discovered that if you use the IP address (___IP ADDRESS__) and MAP a drive letter to it, the problem goes away.


So I then ran my backups. I have a server on my network and decided to run a comparison test. I backed up my PC to the both the server and the MyBook World Edition II. Here are the results:


78 GigaBytes to the File server using Windows XP Backup:


80 Minutes


78 GigaBytes to the MyBook World Edition II, Win XP Bkup:


270 Minutes (!)

shendy wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2008 at 12:40pm:

I'd like to get it going direct to the NAS drive but if not I will try to make some room on some other drives and do the backup to that and then copy over to the NAS OR hook it up direct to the NAS and do an old fashioned copy/paste.  I should probably just do that, but I am stubborn and want to try to do it through ghost.

I'm not encouraging you to give up on Ghost 12.  Just suggesting that you verify throughput with simple tests to try to isolate the problem.

This proably won't affect anything, but I know there have been two updates to Ghost 12 since it first came out.  Help/Run LiveUpdate from the Ghost 12 toolbar.

If you have option of connecting NAS either as USB2 or ethernet, try USB2.  As I mentioned privously be sure the wireless is disabled.  Control Panel/Network/ then disable wireless or some laptops have special ctrl keys to disable wireless.

I understand.  At some point I might grab the trial ver of Ghost 14.  Looks like it will automatically create a backup on ext drive 1 and then copy backup files to NAS/another drive/offsite.  But you are right, I'll do some more throughput testing first.

Thanks for your patience.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C26EFA36-98E0-4EE9-A7C5-98D0592D8C52&displaylang=en

Came across this nifty utility from Microsoft.  Sync Toy.  Am hoping this will do what I need with that E: drive.  I don't really have to have an image of that one.  I tried Ghost's file & folders option but ran into the same problem as with trying to image it.  The WD Mybook NAS drive is neither NTFS or FAT32.  It's a proprietary format of some sort.  Ugh!  Can't find anything really wrong with network throughput and have had a look at my hijackthis.log too.  That e: drive has a lot of large compressed files on it which is probably contributing to the slow transfer.  The Ghost progress screen really isn't all that informative.  Sync Toy and even the Windows backup program at least tells me what file it's copying and/or gives me a file count.  With sync toy I know exactly what file it's copying and % complete so I know that it's not just hung. I'll still use ghost for imaging the c: drive though.  At least for now.

Although I use Ghost for image backups of my operating system partition, I don't use it for data-partition backups.  I define Ghost backups as "independent" recovery points because then everything I need to recover is in that backup-image-file.  Others on this forum like the incremental backups, but I just like the simplicity of a full/complete/independent image backup all in one file.

Microsoft's free Synctoy as well as Replicator (www.karenware.com) and Goodsync (www.goodsync.com) and lots of others are good for data backups.  Plus when you see the backup file/folder, you actually SEE the backup file.  So you only need to update the backup with changes copies of your music, video, documents, etc. not the whole partition.