Radified Community Forums - Ghost 10 unattended backup

GrahamG

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Ghost 10 unattended backup
Jan 23^rd, 2007 at 4:02pm

I have been using Ghost10 for a couple of weeks now. I have one problem. Timed periodic backup. The problem is on my wifes laptop, most of the time it is in standby. I have tried setting Ghost to backup at 8am to an external USB hard drive every other day. I had expected that if the laptop was used at say 11am Ghost would kick off and do its thing. But it just never starts. Today I decided to try another tactic and have made an XP scheduled task to wake the laptop at 7:58am. I was hoping that there was an option in Ghost to put the laptop back to sleep. But there doesn't seem to be one.

Can anyone suggest a solution. I was using Acronis which did the unattended backup fine. The problem with Acronis is that if I tried a system restore from CD it refused to recognise the external Hard drive which made it potentially useless. Ghost works fine in this respect.

I wonder, can Norton Save and Restore wakeup-backup-sleep a laptop?

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	Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup Reply #1 - Jan 24^th, 2007 at 1:04am Good question. I'm eager to hear what the Ghost 10/11 gurus will have to say.
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John.

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	Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup Reply #2 - Jan 24^th, 2007 at 8:37am The laptop should fall back into standby naturally depending on your Start/Control Panel/Power Options settings. I searched Google for "xp standby immediate force" and found this program. Never used it but it appears that it will force standby plus other options. http://users.pandora.be/jbosman/applications.html
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GrahamG

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #3 - Jan 24^th, 2007 at 10:38am

Thanks, today the laptop must have started because when the laptop screen was opened the laptop was already running with the Norton screen popped up, a quick check and yes Norton had done an incremental backup.

Closed the lid and the laptop went back to sleep.

Thanks for the reminder about the power options setting I will see what they are and try to adjust them. If that fails I will look into the other weblink you suggested.

Unattended automatic backup seems a fairly basic omission from Ghost. But I do want to get to a point that my wifes laptop can always be recovered in case of a catastrophy.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #4 - Jan 24^th, 2007 at 12:40pm

Standby (and then hibernate) are basically battery-saving options used primarily with laptops. You should have dual settings on your Power Settings, one for when the laptop is on battery and one when it is plugged in.

I wouldn't want a PC doing a disk intensive operation such as Ghost backups when a laptop is on battery, only when on ac power.

Quote:

Unattended automatic backup seems a fairly basic omission from Ghost 10.

It's not really a Ghost omission. It's a Windows XP setting.

I use automatic unattended backup with Ghost on several PC's, all desktops. I have the power settings to never enter standby and never enter hibernate.

I once had a customer ask me "Will Ghost automatically backup my pc at night if I shut it down and turn it off?" duhhh.

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GrahamG

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #5 - Jan 24^th, 2007 at 11:58pm

Thanks for the input. I also use Ghost on a PC that never sleeps. Do nightly backup to an internal 500gb ($49 from Bestbuy). This drive spins down nicely when it's not used. So I feel reasonably insured. Providing the PSU doesn't fry everything one day.

The laptop is a Toshiba which has its own power handling suite that replaces XP's, for some reason it is not sleeping the laptop after the 30 minutes that it is supposed to. Dont know why. I will try the other pandora.be link and give it a shot. If that doesn't work then I will just let the laptop run until my wife uses it and then closes the lid to sleep it again.

I still think there is an error with the Ghost timer though. It appears that it needs to be in an active system at the time the timer triggers. I tried it again today I set it to backup at 11:30am. Put the laptop to sleep and restarted it at 11:40am but Ghost did not kick off at all.

Anyway thanks for all the hints. I can work around this quirk.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #6 - Jan 25^th, 2007 at 8:31am

GrahamG wrote on Jan 24^th, 2007 at 11:58pm:

I still think there is an error with the Ghost timer though. It appears that it needs to be in an active system at the time the timer triggers. I tried it again today I set it to backup at 11:30am. Put the laptop to sleep and restarted it at 11:40am but Ghost did not kick off at all.

There are several XP services that "go to sleep" during standby, which is the intent of standby. For example when you resume from standby in XP, any wireless Internet connections are rescanned searched and re-established. Standby is meant to minimize the use (and battery drain or electrical power) on a computer. The way this is done is to shut down programs and xp functions using only the minimum required that will wake everything up again.

You want a fully awake patient and anesthesia at the same time.

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John.

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #7 - Jan 25^th, 2007 at 9:41am

I just thought of another possibility: Is it possible your laptop is going into hibernate mode, not standby mode?

Normally, you set the standby mode to 30 minutes, and then hibernate to 60 minutes. The PC first enters standby mode and then later enters hibernate.

In hibernate mode, the memory is written to hard disk and the pc is literally shut down and turned off. When you open lid or press power button, then memory is read back from the hard drive and it is much faster than a normal boot process. Any applications are back running where they were.

Maybe Ghost is waking up from standby mode. But it's not possible as far as I know to wake up from hibernate mode except through manual intervention.

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GrahamG

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #8 - Jan 25^th, 2007 at 8:06pm

Well I think that laptop has a problem. It will go to standby when its lid is closed but it wont standby if the timer is set to any amount of minutes ( I tested using 10 mins). Neither will it hibernate either. So some process or other is stopping it and I dont know how to check that.

I did try the

http://users.pandora.be/jbosman/applications.html

suggestion and tried using that to go to standby after a process stopped. I chose GhostTray.exe. But that didn't work either.

It is getting a bit silly, to use XP "scheduled tasks" to wakeup, A timer on Ghost a few minutes later, and then another program to go back to standby....

Most other backup program (Acronis included) use the XP scheduled tasks to wakeup with and then they have their own built in option to hibernate or standby when it is finished. I still think that this is an omision from Ghost.

Anyway, I still wonder if Norton Save and Restore has any additional features that would fix my problem.

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John.

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	Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup Reply #9 - Jan 28^th, 2007 at 1:19pm There is a thread here regarding using a Ghost feature such as Ghost 10 scripting which may be just exactly what you are looking for. I haven't used VBS scripting with Ghost 10 myself, but it appears that others have.
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GrahamG

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Re: Ghost 10 unattended backup
Reply #10 - Feb 5^th, 2007 at 4:19pm

Thanks for the link, but it looks like it is probably beyond my ability to implement. I have more or less given up on this. I have set it so that "Scheduled tasks" wakes the laptop at 4am every other day and Ghost starts at 4:03am. The laptop then runs until someone uses it and closes the lid. Then it goes back to standby. It would be nice for the laptop to go back to standby itself after Ghost has completed, but it doesn't work right.

I know its crude, but it works.

Thanks.

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