davido,

A ghost image (recovery point) is compressed and usually equals about 60% of the used space in a partition. I'm not a Vista user but your .v2i image seems too small. (Forget the 3 kb file)

Did you Verify the image? Can you do that now from the Image browser?

Also, right click the .v2i image and click Mount. Accept the choices. Navigate through the virtual drive and confirm if it is complete. Let us know what you find.

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. First, you wanna see the "Succeeded" message at complation.



. Next, check the SIZE of the directory where your back-up files are stored. For example, I just backed up my C drive today, which contains ~ 30 gigs of total data (closer to 29).

The back-up directory I created for the Independent recovery point is ~22 gigs.

22 / 29 = 76 percent, which sounds reasonable. What is *not* reasonable? Less than 50% would lead me to investigate further.

Note that small files, such as O/S files compress well (since any file smaller than 4KB will consume 4KB of space on a NTFS drive. Files such as MP3's do *not* compress very much (since they are already "compressed" .. sorta .. actually "encoded").

. Lastly, as Brian mentions, a browse thru the back-up image ("Recovery point") .. to check for the existence of a sampling of the files which should be there. Personally,I wouldn't do this unless I saw problems with #1 & #2.

On a tangential note, I would recommend only backing up after a fresh reboot, after the disk activity light calms down and before opening any other apps. Don't do anything while backing up. This gives you the greatest chance of creating a successful back-up image .. uh, I mean, "Recovery point".

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You suk. Must be nice. I have 60 on my laptop.

You may also like this:

http://radified.com/Articles/laptop.htm

I am using an IBM T41 laptop running Windows XP home with Ghost 12.0. The 40Gb (copy drive) is internal and the 100Gb (destination drive) is usb external. I do a disk to disk drive copy, it informes me that the copy was successful. When I swap the drives the new (destination drive) will not boot.  What is the problem??????????

Brian wrote on Feb 15^th, 2008 at 4:19pm:


The system restore feature of Vista works differently (much more robust) than XP.  In Xp when you restore to a previous xp restore point, XP basically restores the registry back to that point.  Vista has added volume shadow services so that in addition to the registry, actual system file changes are also tracked and can be rolled back with system restore.

From what I can tell, Ghost 12 does NOT backup these volume shadow storage files (they wouldn't be of use anyway in a Ghost 12 restore since you're using Ghost not Vista to restore).  In fact they are unmovable.  You might be able to see their positions depending upon what defrag program you use.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/06/26/how-to-change-and-limit-system-restore-...
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Bottom line, to determine ACTUAL amount Ghost should be backing up:
1. Look at properties for c: drive, and look at Used Space (on mine 165gb partition, used 39gb).
2. From elevated command prompt, enter:  vssadmin list shadowstorage

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Note, on mine I have 19.454 gb allocated.

3. From the partition used space (39gb on my c: drive) subtract the shadowstorage space (19gb) and you get 20gb, which is the amount that Ghost 12 will image.  Ghost 12 also doesn't image the page file which might be about 1 gb.

I just looked at my most recent Ghost 12 image backup file (normal compression) and it is about 10gb.  So I achieved 50% compression, which is close to what Brian stated (60%) as normal.

There are many articles (search on Google) explaining how you can use the vssadmin command to restrict the amount of storage used if you want.  I have mine set to 20gb.  But if you haven't changed yours, then it can be using 15% of your hard drive, which on today's hard drive sizes, can be quite large.  But you don't really have to worry about it causing large Ghost 12 image backup file sizes.

Summary:  Verify if the Ghost backup image sizes now seem reasonable, after deducting space used for volume shadow storage.

An easy way to remove old VSS files is to launch the Disk Cleanup utility, and select the “System Restore and Shadow Copies” option.  This will delete all but the most recent System Restore Point plus all shadow copies of files.

My understanding is that VSS is only enabled for the Business and Ultimate versions of Windows Vista.

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Here is how Diskeeper 2008 works in conjunction with VSS:

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It is important to be aware that when VSS is enabled on a volume with a cluster size smaller than 16 KB, VSS will see file movement done by the defragmentation process as changed data and take a point-in-time snapshot, even though only the location of the data has changed. Unnecessary snapshots will cause the VSS storage area to increases in size, possibly resulting in earlier VSS snapshots being purged. Diskeeper provides special defragmentation methods to allow you to defragment these VSS enabled volumes, yet minimize the possibility that older VSS snapshots will be purged. When the VSS defragmentation option is enabled, Diskeeper uses proprietary defragmentation engines to help reduce the chance of the defragmentation operation causing new VSS snapshots from being created, thus potentially preventing older snapshots from being purged. In order to do this, the VSS defragmentation engines use more conservative file movement algorithms, which can result in slightly less thorough defragmentation of the volume. Despite this, performance is still improved when this method is enabled. (Keep in mind that a large file in two pieces has virtually no performance loss, but it shows as much red color in the Volume Map tab as a file in several thousand pieces, which does suffer from performance loss.)

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StorageCraft has confirmed that ShadowProtect Desktop does include the “shadow copies” of files in the backup image (see this post).  As a result, I suspect that the same is true of Norton Ghost 12, too.  This hypothesis could be tested by restoring an image and looking to see if previous versions of files on the VSS volume are present.