Backup failure.

[Allen Drake]

I have this problem. Ya gotta love this conversation.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

 

[VanguardLH]

I have this problem. Ya gotta love this conversation.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

If you want to post there about your same same problem then post there.
if you want to post here, define YOUR setup and problem rather than
expecting anyone to wade through a forum thread about someone ELSE's
problem.

Start a new thread here and ask about YOUR setup and problem. Or stick
to the forum to ask anew there.

 

[Char Jackson]

I have this problem. Ya gotta love this conversation.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

Microsoft provides a very rudimentary backup program which, on its
best day, pales in comparison to multiple other backup solutions, some
of which are free. Given that, I find it odd and yet interesting that
some people choose the Microsoft solution and actively reject the
solutions which are clearly better. Human nature, I guess.

 

[Paul]

I have this problem. Ya gotta love this conversation.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

You know, some people don't have a boot partition. No 100MB
thing sitting there. All their files are on the one partition.

So you'd really need to review your setup, any programs you
might have used, to see which one of those was causing problems.

Gentoo Linux has a nice solution for this. During normal system
operation, the boot partition (small, like Windows 7 boot partition)
isn't mounted, so you'll be less tempted to keep stuff in it.
It's too small to be used for regular storage.

I'm really surprised the boot partition is allowed to host as many
things, as people are finding. One guy managed to have a pagefile
placed on his boot partition. I wonder how that happened

And as far as their mention of "journal", I thought the journal
had a fixed size. I checked the one on my Windows 7 laptop, and
I think it's 36MB right now, for the C: drive. Does the same
size journal get used, regardless of partition size ?

File 86789
\$Extend\$UsnJrnl
$STANDARD_INFORMATION (resident)
$FILE_NAME (resident)
$DATA $J (nonresident)
logical sectors 53869336-53941527 (0x335fb18-0x3371517)
$DATA $Max (resident)

Paul

 

[Thip]

I have this problem. Ya gotta love this conversation.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

One potential solution: Macrium Reflect (free)

 

[Allen Drake]

If you want to post there about your same same problem then post there.
if you want to post here, define YOUR setup and problem rather than
expecting anyone to wade through a forum thread about someone ELSE's
problem.

Start a new thread here and ask about YOUR setup and problem. Or stick
to the forum to ask anew there.

I had an offering without expecting anything from anyone, least or
which would be you.

You think you are some boss around here. I get it. Good luck with
that. If you don't like what is posted even is it is win7 related then
try not posting you negativity and move on, Get over it. Walk it off.

 

[Allen Drake]

Microsoft provides a very rudimentary backup program which, on its
best day, pales in comparison to multiple other backup solutions, some
of which are free. Given that, I find it odd and yet interesting that
some people choose the Microsoft solution and actively reject the
solutions which are clearly better. Human nature, I guess.

A bit less then rudimentary I would say. Maybe MS should concentrate
more on providing some fixes in with all their useless updates. Just a
thought.

 

[Allen Drake]

You know, some people don't have a boot partition. No 100MB
thing sitting there. All their files are on the one partition.

So you'd really need to review your setup, any programs you
might have used, to see which one of those was causing problems.

Gentoo Linux has a nice solution for this. During normal system
operation, the boot partition (small, like Windows 7 boot partition)
isn't mounted, so you'll be less tempted to keep stuff in it.
It's too small to be used for regular storage.

I'm really surprised the boot partition is allowed to host as many
things, as people are finding. One guy managed to have a pagefile
placed on his boot partition. I wonder how that happened

And as far as their mention of "journal", I thought the journal
had a fixed size. I checked the one on my Windows 7 laptop, and
I think it's 36MB right now, for the C: drive. Does the same
size journal get used, regardless of partition size ?

File 86789
\$Extend\$UsnJrnl
$STANDARD_INFORMATION (resident)
$FILE_NAME (resident)
$DATA $J (nonresident)
logical sectors 53869336-53941527 (0x335fb18-0x3371517)
$DATA $Max (resident)

Paul

Not much surprises me about MS these days. Out of curiosity I was
responding to their pre configured nag about backing up every Sunday
and watching the DVDs pile up. I figured why not use an internal drive
when I encountered this failed procedure. Then upon reading the
countless threads I decided it was simple entertainment at best.

 

[Allen Drake]

One potential solution: Macrium Reflect (free)

I just viewed that thread.

Thanks.

Al.

 

[Stan Brown]

Microsoft provides a very rudimentary backup program which, on its
best day, pales in comparison to multiple other backup solutions, some
of which are free. Given that, I find it odd and yet interesting that
some people choose the Microsoft solution and actively reject the
solutions which are clearly better. Human nature, I guess.

Ignorance, I would say.

I'm not aware of any really good free solutions; can you suggest one?
I'm currently using Acronis, but it's bloated and slow and the user
interface sucks.

 

[Char Jackson]

Ignorance, I would say.

I'm not aware of any really good free solutions; can you suggest one?
I'm currently using Acronis, but it's bloated and slow and the user
interface sucks.

My current favorite is Acronis True Image 2010. The interface on the
2011 version is awkward and not very intuitive, IMO.

I found myself at a customer's premises about two weeks ago without a
copy of Acronis so I downloaded the free version of Macrium Reflect
and was suitably impressed. I only have that single experience with
it, but it seemed to work every bit as well as Acronis. Macrium
Reflect Free has also been recommended by several of the regulars
here, so it's worth a look.

 

[Paul]

Not much surprises me about MS these days. Out of curiosity I was
responding to their pre configured nag about backing up every Sunday
and watching the DVDs pile up. I figured why not use an internal drive
when I encountered this failed procedure. Then upon reading the
countless threads I decided it was simple entertainment at best.

You know, I've made backups using their stuff, with the express purpose
of getting .vhd files (I'd sooner do that and store it on another hard
drive, than make DVDs). I have a .vhd image of my laptop, loaded in
virtual PC 2007 on this WinXP machine. That's how I can see what files
are on the laptop, without booting the laptop. By mounting that .vhd
in a Linux virtual machine, I can even see the vsscache files that Windows
is so careful to give an "access denied" message for. (They take space
on the disk, but don't seem to be conventional files. So it's not like
there is something of value in them. A checksum of one of the files,
came out to exactly "00000", meaning all the data was zeros!)

Now, I notice, my W7 backup thing is broken. It's one of the reasons
I'm monkeying around with the laptop now, trying to fix it. I thought
it might be a context menu issue, but that's not it (I used the Nirsoft
shell extension viewer thing, to disable some of them). About the only
thing that might have changed over the months, is a few "patch
Tuesdays".

Well, that's why we get these computers with the new OSes on them.
It's like getting a newspaper, for the daily puzzle page

The reason things like this break, is they're too decoupled,
and rely on the health of too many subsystems and widgets. If
a person was to write a hundred pages of assembler code, that
just copies a hard drive to a DVD or copies a hard drive to
an external hard drive, that would *never* break. In fact, I'm
willing to bet that a lot of people in this newsgroup, could
write their own backup application that would work better than the
one we're bashing right now.

For comparison, I used this utility last year, as a test of taking
a physical machine and loading it into a virtual machine. (I copied
my current WinXP machine, and tried to run it in virtual PC on the
same machine. Of course, activation would be broken, but it did
actually boot up.) This relies on the Volume Shadow Service too,
which is why it could take a copy of WinXP while it was running.
And this didn't cause me any problems. So this is very similar
to a backup in Windows 7 (a .vhd), but isn't exactly the same,
as it keeps more than one partition in the image. The .vhd
files Windows 7 makes are one partition per file.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415

Paul

 

[Bob Henson]

My current favorite is Acronis True Image 2010. The interface on the
2011 version is awkward and not very intuitive, IMO.

I found myself at a customer's premises about two weeks ago without a
copy of Acronis so I downloaded the free version of Macrium Reflect
and was suitably impressed. I only have that single experience with
it, but it seemed to work every bit as well as Acronis. Macrium
Reflect Free has also been recommended by several of the regulars
here, so it's worth a look.

Did you get any problems unpacking it? I downloaded the current version and
Avast! antivirus tells me that the file is a decompression bomb. This
doesn't necessarily mean it is malicious, but does mean that it is very
compressed and could cause a problem by decompressing to a huge size.

 

[Char Jackson]

Did you get any problems unpacking it? I downloaded the current version and
Avast! antivirus tells me that the file is a decompression bomb. This
doesn't necessarily mean it is malicious, but does mean that it is very
compressed and could cause a problem by decompressing to a huge size.

No, no problems unpacking it.

 

[Stan Brown]

[quoted text muted]

I'm not aware of any really good free solutions; can you suggest one?
I'm currently using Acronis, but it's bloated and slow and the user
interface sucks.

My current favorite is Acronis True Image 2010. The interface on the
2011 version is awkward and not very intuitive, IMO.

Amen to that. I have 2011, unfortunately.

 

[Allen Drake]

You know, I've made backups using their stuff, with the express purpose
of getting .vhd files (I'd sooner do that and store it on another hard
drive, than make DVDs). I have a .vhd image of my laptop, loaded in
virtual PC 2007 on this WinXP machine. That's how I can see what files
are on the laptop, without booting the laptop. By mounting that .vhd
in a Linux virtual machine, I can even see the vsscache files that Windows
is so careful to give an "access denied" message for. (They take space
on the disk, but don't seem to be conventional files. So it's not like
there is something of value in them. A checksum of one of the files,
came out to exactly "00000", meaning all the data was zeros!)

Interesting. I had not done any investigating of that feature. I just
got through reading about your option and I must say it is a great
idea.

Now, I notice, my W7 backup thing is broken. It's one of the reasons
I'm monkeying around with the laptop now, trying to fix it. I thought
it might be a context menu issue, but that's not it (I used the Nirsoft
shell extension viewer thing, to disable some of them). About the only
thing that might have changed over the months, is a few "patch
Tuesdays".

I checked the backup option on my other Win7 systems and they don't
give me the error/failure I got on this one system. I have been trying
you find out what I did differently but so far they are basically all
the same setup.

Well, that's why we get these computers with the new OSes on them.
It's like getting a newspaper, for the daily puzzle page

This is all entertainment to me anyway. I have a new and unused ASUS
G73SW-BST-6 still sitting here on my desk as it has been for a few
months at least and my latest build I have been thinking of selling
probably at a loss. I changed my mind and want to go with INTEL and a
Core i7-980X.

The reason things like this break, is they're too decoupled,
and rely on the health of too many subsystems and widgets. If
a person was to write a hundred pages of assembler code, that
just copies a hard drive to a DVD or copies a hard drive to
an external hard drive, that would *never* break. In fact, I'm
willing to bet that a lot of people in this newsgroup, could
write their own backup application that would work better than the
one we're bashing right now.

Agreed.


For comparison, I used this utility last year, as a test of taking
a physical machine and loading it into a virtual machine. (I copied
my current WinXP machine, and tried to run it in virtual PC on the
same machine. Of course, activation would be broken, but it did
actually boot up.) This relies on the Volume Shadow Service too,
which is why it could take a copy of WinXP while it was running.
And this didn't cause me any problems. So this is very similar
to a backup in Windows 7 (a .vhd), but isn't exactly the same,
as it keeps more than one partition in the image. The .vhd
files Windows 7 makes are one partition per file.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415

Paul

Good read. Thanks.

Al.