I'm evaluating some backup solutions and am trying the demo of Ghost 12.

The first problem was that installing Ghost made my windows activation kick in... that's super-annoying and while I know that's kind of MS' bad, nothing else has caused that so far on my box.

The real issue I have with Ghost 12 though is that it seems completely unable to copy encrypted files (WinXP Pro, using the native 'encrypt file contents' option). That's sort of fine, though Acronis' backup solution does it without flinching. The thing that scares me is that when ghost hits an encrypted file it throws out an error about not being able to connect to the recovery system, and stops the job. Ack! A backup solution that doesn't back up files? No way! I've searched to no avail for an option to allow a backup job to continue even if it can't read a file. This is like the days of "copy" in DOS. 

But my concerns with the maturity of Ghost 12 aside, my real question is this: would Save  & Restore do any better of a job at this? Ghost 12 is a bit much for my needs but there is no trial version of S&R. I fear that getting S&R would result in the same problem. I only need folder-based backups on a schedule and the occasional disk image/disk-to-disk clone job.

Otherwise, is there a software program that will do this without errors? Acronis True Image seems to work fine, but it's kind of over-complicated to use to define custom backup jobs, and I wonder if it can do offline (Ghost 9-like) stuff.

I'm copying my user data from Drive C: (main app drive) and some project files from Drive D: (data drive) to my backup drive E:. So there's no sharing going on, and drive E is not encrypted or protected in any way. It popped up because some of my source code files are encrypted here and there from when I was moving them around on memory sticks.

The Ghost error (as soon as it hits one of those encrypted files -- if I unencrypt them then it backs them up fine until it hits another one) is ebab0005... error log says:

Quote:

Note: File names changed to protect the innocent. myprogram.exe is an encrypted file (shows green in windows explorer), but if I decrypt myprogram.exe then it will just die with the same error on the next encrypted file it hits. TrueImage backed up all the encrypted files just fine, so it's not some weird disk error.

What bugs me is that all the other files left to backup in the job don't get copied. Ghost should at least continue on with the other files if it couldn't read one... though the error suggests something internal in the ghost service is deciding to kick over and die for whatever reason.

Pleonasm wrote on Jul 8^th, 2007 at 9:22am:

The destination for the backup is a local drive though... no networking involved. It must just be some kind of bug in Ghost 12, because I can't envision any other reason for the whole backup process to fail if permission is denied for just one source file. The backup job should still continue and at least back up all the other accessible files.

For now the only thing I can do is to run the backup job repeatedly until I've found and decrypted every file it hangs up on. Once the files are decrypted, Ghost backs them up fine.

Perhaps they didn't test it with encrypted files via the built-in windows encryption feature, or perhaps there's some oddity with how it works in Windows MCE2005 (SP2). The files that are protected are totally accessible to me, so perhaps Ghost is accessing them from some other account (other than mine) that doesn't have the decryption keys installed.

Reading historical posts I see people have had problems like this since at least Ghost 10, though usually because of bad sectors on the disk. To me it's just scary to think that my backup program won't do its job if it hits so much as one little snag. Yikes. But while TrueImage marches through like a champ, it has rumored issues of not being able to restore properly. ::rolleyes::

wildfire99,

You are correct. I tried a Files and Folders backup with encrypted files and they don't copy.

I don't use the Files and Folders backup component of Ghost 12. I don't like it and here is another reason not to like it. I backup my data in native format.