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Howard Kaikow

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Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Sets
Dec 4^th, 2005 at 2:55pm

Installed Ghost 10 on 29 November 2005.

Created a Recovery point set to include all drives. Let's say I named the critter Set1.

I ran a backup to a USB drive.

Then I swapped in another USB drive and tried to create another recovery point set, which I tried to name Set2.

I was not allowed to do that as logical drives can be assigned to only one recovery set.

So I continued with the backup and another Set1 was created on the 2nd USB drive.

Is there any to use a different name for the recovery set on each USB drive? Makes it easier to keep track of things.

Then, I tried to Explore and Browse the recovery sets.

Alas, the list of recovery points does not distinguish between the sets that are on each drive, so I naturally get an error trying to access a recovery point not on the currently mounted USB volume.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #1 - Dec 4^th, 2005 at 4:17pm

Howard Kaikow wrote on Dec 4^th, 2005 at 2:55pm:

Installed Ghost 10 on 29 November 2005.
Created a Recovery point set to include all drives. Let's say I named the critter Set1.
I ran a backup to a USB drive.
Then I swapped in another USB drive and tried to create another recovery point set, which I tried to name Set2.
I was not allowed to do that as logical drives can be assigned to only one recovery set.
So I continued with the backup and another Set1 was created on the 2nd USB drive.
Is there any to use a different name for the recovery set on each USB drive? Makes it easier to keep track of things.
Then, I tried to Explore and Browse the recovery sets.

Alas, the list of recovery points does not distinguish between the sets that are on each drive, so I naturally get an error trying to access a recovery point not on the currently mounted USB volume.

Do both of your USB drives have different volume names and drive letters when connected? That might be a factor if not.

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #2 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 10:45am

John. wrote on Dec 4^th, 2005 at 4:17pm:

Do both of your USB drives have different volume names and drive letters when connected? That might be a factor if not.

Only 1 drive is connected at a time, so the OS will assign the same drive letter each time, independently of the volume name.

If Ghost needs to distinguish volumes using another criteria, that is something specific to the recovery point set and has nothing to do with the drive letter.

The drive letter must be under user control as a drive may not be dedicated to Ghost and may be used for other apps as well.

Seems like a real botch, if the problem is being caused by Ghost.

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	Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set Reply #3 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:08am Howard Kaikow Interesting--I would have thought WinXP would keep track which USB drive is which with drive letters being reserved for a particular HDD ID. Do you have the ability to choose a directory where you save your images--can you make that unique?
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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #4 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:29am

NightOwl wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:08am:

Howard Kaikow

Interesting--I would have thought WinXP would keep track which USB drive is which with drive letters being reserved for a particular HDD ID.

Do you have the ability to choose a directory where you save your images--can you make that unique?

I'm using Win 2000, not XP.

THe OS assigns a unigue signature to each drive.

The drive letter is independent of volume identification, you can see that when you swap media, say, ZIP, CD/DVD drives.

I suspect this problem is being cause dby a faulty design in Ghost.

For example, with Retrospect, the program keeps track of the drive signatures and internally distinguishes among drives using the signature.

For example, earlier this year, my main hard drive died.
As a result, I ended up reformatting that and a few other drives.
For each drive that I had reformatted, Retrospect found a different signature, and treated them as different drives, even tho they had the same drive letter, as far as Retrospect was concerned.

The solution was to then tellRetrospect which drive definition was the one to be used and to ignore the other.

I expect that Ghost is doing something internally to keep track of such things. I suspect each USB drive has a different signature.

But Ghost is misdesigned if it is changing drive letters when media is swapped. While a drive with a different signature is indeed a different drive and must be identified as such within a recovery set, the drive letter is just an artifact of how windows references a drive.

Hmm, I think I'll write a program to report drive signatures.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #5 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:30am

NightOwl wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:08am:

Howard Kaikow

Interesting--I would have thought WinXP would keep track which USB drive is which with drive letters being reserved for a particular HDD ID.

Do you have the ability to choose a directory where you save your images--can you make that unique?

I would connect both external USB drives at same time to XP at least once and then use My Computer/Properties/Disk Management/ right click each usb drive, and assign it a LOW drive letter, such as f: and g: or next ones that are not used.

From then on XP will use the same unique drive letter for each respective external.

Yes, in the wizard you must tell Ghost 10 where to store your images. Create a folder(s) on each external, then use Ghost wizard and point to the right drive letter/folder.

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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John.

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	Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set Reply #6 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:32am Are your external USB hard drives FAT32 or NTFS? With NTFS the unique diskid and drive assigned properties are stored ON the drive itself. If you have 2 FAT32 externals (the way the normally come from the manufacturer), I would reformat them to NTFS.
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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #7 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 12:29pm

John. wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:30am:

I would connect both external USB drives at same time to XP at least once and then use My Computer/Properties/Disk Management/ right click each usb drive, and assign it a LOW drive letter, such as f: and g: or next ones that are not used.

From then on XP will use the same unique drive letter for each respective external.

Yes, in the wizard you must tell Ghost 10 where to store your images. Create a folder(s) on each external, then use Ghost wizard and point to the right drive letter/folder.

Of course, the problem would go away if BOTH drives were concurrently mounted, but that's not the issue.

A drive itself has no identification of the drive letter, rather the drive letter is created internally by the OS.

Swapping drives causes ther same drive letter to be used for the connected drive, no different than swapping ZIP or CD or DND drives.

In any case, the issue is one of Ghost not allowing the definition of more than one recovery point set for the same drives. It's really just an identification convenience as Ghost will still create the recovery set on each USB drive as if the ither did not exist.

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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #8 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 12:34pm

John. wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 11:32am:

Are your external USB hard drives FAT32 or NTFS? With NTFS the unique diskid and drive assigned properties are stored ON the drive itself.

If you have 2 FAT32 externals (the way the normally come from the manufacturer), I would reformat them to NTFS.

The drive is NTFS, but that is not the issue.
Ghost is not allowing me the convenience of having two differently named recovery point sets for the same drive(s).

The benefit is as follows.

If I choose to recover from a particular named set, Ghost could inform me that I have the wrong media mounted.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #9 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 1:28pm

The Recovery Set nomenclature is new to Ghost 10. I think it is a borrow-over from GoBack to take all the intelligence away from the user. I thought Ghost 9 design better myself.

However, you can control it yourself. Instead of choosing the Recovery Point, just browse for the backup set image you want to restore. And you don't have to mount it or assign a drive letter to restore.

In my case (not saying everyone does this) I only take full backup sets once a week and have Ghost keep 3 generations so I have 3 weeks of backups (I also copy one monthly to DVD and every six months put the dvd in my bank safety deposit box).

So there is no confusion about incrementals. I just pick the date I want to restore a file/folder/partition and use that. Besides as we both have discovered Ghost will take a full base backup when it thinks the full backup is easier than incremental.

The main advantage of Recovery Points (I could be wrong on this) that I see is that Ghost keeps a catalog and maintains everything for you. That is why I think you are having difficulty backing up the same partition to several external locations and then expecting Ghost to remember that.

You might try this which I have done succesfully: Create ANOTHER backup job definiton for your c: (or other) and point it to a different external volume. Make it manual. I know you can run this one as well as the other definition and each will go to the place you want. You can specify different options (verify, chunk size etc) on each one or have this one go to DVD.

But asking Ghost to recover back to a set point in time when he has two recovery points would seem difficult to choose. Even I would have trouble deciding ...

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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #10 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 6:21pm

John. wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 1:28pm:

The Recovery Set nomenclature is new to Ghost 10. I think it is a borrow-over from GoBack to take all the intelligence away from the user. I thought Ghost 9 design better myself.

However, you can control it yourself. Instead of choosing the Recovery Point, just browse for the backup set image you want to restore. And you don't have to mount it or assign a drive letter to restore.

In my case (not saying everyone does this) I only take full backup sets once a week and have Ghost keep 3 generations so I have 3 weeks of backups (I also copy one monthly to DVD and every six months put the dvd in my bank safety deposit box).

So there is no confusion about incrementals. I just pick the date I want to restore a file/folder/partition and use that. Besides as we both have discovered Ghost will take a full base backup when it thinks the full backup is easier than incremental.

The main advantage of Recovery Points (I could be wrong on this) that I see is that Ghost keeps a catalog and maintains everything for you. That is why I think you are having difficulty backing up the same partition to several external locations and then expecting Ghost to remember that.

You might try this which I have done succesfully: Create ANOTHER backup job definiton for your c: (or other) and point it to a different external volume. Make it manual. I know you can run this one as well as the other definition and each will go to the place you want. You can specify different options (verify, chunk size etc) on each one or have this one go to DVD.

But asking Ghost to recover back to a set point in time when he has two recovery points would seem difficult to choose. Even I would have trouble deciding ...

That's the problem, Ghost will NOT let me create another recpvery set that includes the same drives. A drive may be part of only 1 recovery set. This is very bad design.

Perhaps this new to version 10.

If one swaps USB dribes, then one wants to have a different recovery point set on each drive, and GHost aklkiws this, the problem is identification.

For example, with another backup product, I have a backup set named, say, XYZ-1 on one USB drive, and XYZ-2 on another USB drive.

That product gives me a choice of choosing the easily identifiable backup set. If I happen to have the wrong drive connected, it tells me and I swap the drives.

With Ghost, since there is no such choice, it is all too easy to recovery from the wrong drive.

I hate to break my streak, by saying something positive about Ghost, but Ghost did the right thing in changing the terminolgy from "image file" to "recovery point". A backup is nothing more that a copy at a POINT in time. So picking the appropriate recovery point os a lot clear than picking an image file,

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #11 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 7:22pm

Howard Kaikow wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 6:21pm:

That's the problem, Ghost will NOT let me create another recpvery set that includes the same drives. A drive may be part of only 1 recovery set. This is very bad design.
Perhaps this new to version 10.
If one swaps USB dribes, then one wants to have a different recovery point set on each drive, and GHost aklkiws this, the problem is identification.
For example, with another backup product, I have a backup set named, say, XYZ-1 on one USB drive, and XYZ-2 on another USB drive.
That product gives me a choice of choosing the easily identifiable backup set. If I happen to have the wrong drive connected, it tells me and I swap the drives.
With Ghost, since there is no such choice, it is all too easy to recovery from the wrong drive.

I hate to break my streak, by saying something positive about Ghost, but Ghost did the right thing in changing the terminolgy from "image file" to "recovery point". A backup is nothing more that a copy at a POINT in time. So picking the appropriate recovery point os a lot clear than picking an image file,

> A drive may be part of only 1 recovery set.

Do you mean the backup image may be part of only 1 recovery set? Or that the partition being backed up may be part of only 1 recovery set?

I have created a backup of my c: partition to two different usb drives; each backup definition has a different name. I can restore from whichever external usb2 drive I want. I have never asked Ghost though to use a "recovery point"--I just picked the usb drive/folder/imagefile myself to restore.

Sorry i just don't know what would be different in your situation.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #12 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 7:41pm

Howard Kaikow wrote on Dec 4^th, 2005 at 2:55pm:

I was not allowed to do that as logical drives can be assigned to only one recovery set.

So I continued with the backup and another Set1 was created on the 2nd USB drive.

Is there any to use a different name for the recovery set on each USB drive? Makes it easier to keep track of things.

Maybe I misunderstood your statement. Use Windows Explorer to create unique folder names on each USB2 drive BEFORE creating the Ghost backup wizard definition. As I recall there wasn't any "create new folder" button in the wizard.

You can't change the image names, but you can choose the folder names where they reside.

Ghost4me Ghost 9, 10, 12, 14, 15. Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7

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Howard Kaikow

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Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set
Reply #13 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 8:45pm

John. wrote on Dec 5^th, 2005 at 7:22pm:

> A drive may be part of only 1 recovery set.

Do you mean the backup image may be part of only 1 recovery set? Or that the partition being backed up may be part of only 1 recovery set?

I have created a backup of my c: partition to two different usb drives; each backup definition has a different name. I can restore from whichever external usb2 drive I want. I have never asked Ghost though to use a "recovery point"--I just picked the usb drive/folder/imagefile myself to restore.

Sorry i just don't know what would be different in your situation.

Ghost would not let me define another recovery point set as all the drives were already in another recovery point set.

Do not have the text of the message, but that's what it said.

If I get a chance, I'll try again, right now I'm downloading the demo of Acronis True Image 9.

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Howard Kaikow

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	Re: Ghost 10: Identification of Recovery Point Set Reply #14 - Dec 5^th, 2005 at 9:29pm The following is the message issued by Ghost: "The recover point set option is disabled because you have already assigned a selected drive to an existing recovery point set. You can onlt have one recovery point set defined for each drive."
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