Ghost Solution Suite

I have scheduled a backup of a test machine and unfortuantly I may have over looked something The backup goes perfect except when it tried to do a second one it does another baseline backup. The error is in the event log as follows:

"Failed to find incremental, check that the client is setup correctly. A baseline backup will be preformed instead."

Hi Jeremy,

By any chance, did you clone the client after the first backup was run?


Adina

No there has been no backup/restores/clone done within ghost console as of yet. I been using GhostCast with pxe for a year and ghost console has quite a few features i would like to use. I have the backup regime folder set in the tools options. It says in the log the about the client being setup correctly but I have yet to see any settings that pertain to the incremental backup. So this first backup regime works to create the baseline backup but the incremental backups fail and make new baseline backups, which tend to fill up space very quickly.

That brings up a question, how would clone the client after the first restore affect a backup regiem?Message was edited by:
Jeremy Jones

Hi Jeremy ,

please check:

-Validity of Baseline image (since that is your test machine you can deploy that image back to your source machine or you can just click on image itself and Image Explorer is going to open the image file).

-Did you made any changes on your test machine between Baseline and Incremental backups?(adding or removing files?).

-Are you running any Antivirus software on your test machine?

Regards

Frank

Hi Jeremy,

An incremental image captures only the changes made since the last backup. If the changes you made are too big to be stored as an incremental image, a new baseline image is created, replacing the previous one. Please check that no major changes that require a new baseline were performed (i.e. changes to the operating system).

As for the question regarding cloning the client, if you clone the client after the first backup, when the baseline image was created, everything you had on the client is replaced by the new image and the console has nothing to compare against and determine any changes that have been made since the last backup.


Adina

The machine I am doing an incremental on is a machine just for test and i have only logged into it. I have not change/modify/add anything on this test system. with Windows xp. Any other ideas?

What OS do you have on the client, is it a 64bit? Because some platforms are not supported.

Adina

It is windows XP pro 32bit version with sp2.

Jeremy, you are probably running Ghost 8.0 or 8.2. There used to be a problem with XP SP2 and incremental backup because of automatic updates. At the time we released Ghost 8.0 there was no SP2 for Windows XP and this problem showed up once SP2 was released.
If you disable the automatic updates in the list of services on the client machine, an incremental backup will be performed. You may want to try it, but for the reliability of your system make sure you enable back the service once this is finished.

Adina

I am currently using GSS 2.0 which everywhere I look it is using Ghost 11 we did use GSS 1.1 which had 8 on it but since removed and reinstalled this GSS2.0 version. I disabled the automatic updates in services and also using the group policy editor. It still seems to fail and the message is the same in the event log.

Hi Jeremy,

Can you try to enable logging for the backup regimes on the client machine.
To do this, you'll need to create an empty file called "aitrace.log" in the all users' application data path.

There's no environment variable for this location, but if you're running WinXP Pro, the path to the file should look something like:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\aitrace.log
Note that the "Application Data" folder is hidden so you may not be immediately visible.

Once you've created this file, can you force a baseline of the client. Once the baseline is complete, this file should contain tons of logging information about the snapshot operation.

Then you can try the incremental backup - and once again, logging information will be appended to the file. I'm assuming that the incremental will fail and fall back to a baseline. Anyways, once all this is completed, the aitrace.log file on the client might contain some clues as to why the operation is failing.

You could probably e-mail the resulting logfile to Adina so she can help you isolate the problem.

I have log file. I just need an email address to send it to.

Hi Jeremy,

Could you send the log file to the following email?

<Removed the address after receiving the file>

Krish

I've got the same issue but GSS 1.1, creating the file located in the place stated does not appear to be logging when I am trying to force an image. From the errors I get with creating AI packages, associated with McAfee virus scan I believe this might be the culprit that is keeping the incrimental backups from running. How can I specifically avoid the the attempts to backup the viruscan files which are always in use, but detected as needed update in an incrimental (and I'm guessing that since it can't grab them it does a full backup).

Hi Jeremy

Locate the following file on your client machine:

[...]\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\AIError.log

Note: The Application Data directory is hidden by default

Any files which are readlocked and which cannot be read by the incremental process will be recorded in this log. An entry in this log indicates that a process on your machine is performing an operation on these files while the incremental backup is in progress.

You can identify which process is performing this operation by using Process Monitor from Microsoft.

For GSS 2.0 and later, there is a simple method you can use to exclude these files from the incremental backup. Details here:

https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=109&message.id=4376#M4376

If you still have the system, I would be interested to know which files were readlocked and which process is accessing the named files.

Thanks,
Xan

Message Edited by Xan Todd on 05-23-200706:04 PM