Windows 7 Backup troubles…

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Hello everyone,

[indent]I’ve recently upgraded to a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium which I’ve upgraded to Ultimate. Previously I had bought a 1Tb external hard drive to use for backups and the like. The first I set up the backup it worked great. I had setup a schedule so that it would backup the system every week. This worked fine, for about one week. After this time I kept getting an error saying that the Shadow copy could not be created. I had bought another hard drive for another project and decided to verify if the backup would work in another drive. Unfortunately, no such luck. I know for certain that I have more than enough space too, since I fully formatted both hard drives prior to use, and the laptop’s internal one is less than half full. I’ve tried running disk cleaner, as was recommended to me, but still the backup does not complete. Has anyone ran into this problem or have any possible solution?[/indent]

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Get Acronis and forget about using the MS backup. My backup locked up and MS support could not help. You can look up the flags for sdclt.exe and run backup from the Run command box.

Walt

Hello everyone,

[indent]I’ve recently upgraded to a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium which I’ve upgraded to Ultimate. Previously I had bought a 1Tb external hard drive to use for backups and the like. The first I set up the backup it worked great. I had setup a schedule so that it would backup the system every week. This worked fine, for about one week. After this time I kept getting an error saying that the Shadow copy could not be created. I had bought another hard drive for another project and decided to verify if the backup would work in another drive. Unfortunately, no such luck. I know for certain that i have more than enough space too, since I fully formatted both hard drives prior to use, and the laptop’s internal one is less than half full. I’ve tried running disk cleaner, as was recommended to me, but still the backup does not complete. Has anyone ran into this problem or have any possible solution?[/indent]

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Get Acronis and forget about using the MS backup. My backup locked up and MS support could not help. You can look up the flags for sdclt.exe and run backup from the Run command box.

Walt

So how would I do this? I know there are other options for backing up my PC, but I don’t yet feel that I’ve tried everything to fix Windows Backup. I’ll post an image of the error, maybe that can help identify what’s wrong.

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If you were able to access all the complaints on the internet concerning Windows Backup, you’d have reading material for the next year.

In a nutshell, “it’s just not reliable”. Use something else.

Acronis True Image was already mentioned and it’s a pretty good backup program.
There are ways that you can even get it for free, like with Seatools, from Seagate or MaxBlast from Maxtor.
You’ll need at least one Seagate or Maxtor drive somewhere in your system to use either of these.

Personally, I’ve been using “Ghost” since 1997, way before Symantec bought it, and don’t intend to use anything else. You’ll need Ghost 11.5 or
better to back up Vista or Win-7.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays!

The Doctor

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If you were able to access all the complaints on the internet concerning Windows Backup, you’d have reading material for the next year.

In a nutshell, “it’s just not reliable”. Use something else.

I agree – every version of Windows seems to have “lackings” in the provided backup system.

I have been using StorageCraft Shadow Protect[/url] for some time now and prefer it to Acronis or Ghost.

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It seems like I’m talking about doing backups, at least once a day, on one forum or another,
so to keep my fingers from bleeding, I’ve typed up a little “Backup Tutorial” to hopefully answer
some of the questions about doing backups.
Or to at least express some of my own thoughts on the subject.
***********************************************************************

Some basic answers to questions on doing backups: A Tutorial

A data backup or even a whole drive backup can be as easy or hard as you
want to make it. So for the sake of this tutorial, lets Keep it Simple.

First off, there are several failures that can happen within a PC that can take out every drive in the system.
So you won’t want your data or the program that backed it up, anywhere in your computer.
The data or drive-image, if you’re doing a whole-drive-backup, must be outside the PC, somewhere,
either on an external drive or on DVD’s.

Experience tells me that external HD’s are very prone to failure so that’s not
my most favorite backup media. DVD’s on the other hand, are impervious to EMI or magnetic erasure or even power supply failure and are supposed
to be good for 30 years or so.
The very best backup you can get would be a whole drive backup to DVD’s, stowed away in a fireproof vault.

Likewise, the backup software must NOT be on the internal hard drive.
It’s only going to be useful if it’s on a bootable media, either a Flash Drive or CD.
I have my own backup software (Ghost 2003) on a bootable Floppy,
bootable Flash Drive and a bootable CD.
If one should fail, I have the others as a backup.

Using Ghost 2003 as I do, from a bootable floppy disk, to backup my Windows XP (C: ) drive, to a DVD, Ghost will offer to copy itself to the backup DVD, thus making it boot up my system just like the original floppy did.
So every one of my backup DVD’s is also a copy of my Ghost boot disk.
After making my Ghost backup DVD, I take it into town and store it
in a fireproof vault in a friends office.

A backup sitting next to your PC, in case of fire, theft or natural disaster
is really NO backup at all. It MUST be somewhere safe.

If you cannot put your backup software on your backup disk to boot your
computer, then a boot CD should be stored along with the backup disks.

Setting up a foolproof backup system isn’t rocket science, but does require
a certain amount of forethought and planning.
All the “what if’s” must be addressed.

So that pretty much covers the whole-drive or at least the C: drive backup.
But what about your daily data? That can include new documents, pictures, saved emails, etc.
Those things can be copied to any media like a flash drive or second HD (or partition) quickly and easily with a simple batch file, using the old DOS XCOPY command.
If set up properly, it can do a quick and easy “Incremental backup”.

Such a backup batch file can be put on your desktop for quick and easy
access, or it can be put in your startup folder for a backup on every boot,
or it can be added to a shutdown routine, for a backup before shutdown.
Since it backs up only files that are new or have just been changed, it takes
only a few seconds to do the backup with the batch file.
Here’s a sample line from my own daily backup batch file.

Rem: Back up my WordPerfect files.
xcopy “C:MyFiles*.*” “F:MyFiles” /s /y /H /R /D

For this type of backup, NO external software is required. Everything you
need is already in Windows. Even a whole drive can be backed up to another drive, using this same technique. This would do it:

XCOPY “C:*.*” “D:” /s /y /H /R /D

With so many good options available to every user, it’s not required for
anyone to ever loose their data.

I’ve been setting up backup systems for computers for home and industry since the days of the 5.25″ floppy disk. (more years than I want to admit to)
Never before, have we had so many good options for data storage,
available to the home computer user.
The large flash drives that we have today are excellent for data backup.

I hope this has been helpful.

Happy Holidays Everyone!
The Doctor

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It seems like I’m talking about doing backups, at least once a day, on one forum or another,
so to keep my fingers from bleeding, I’ve typed up a little “Backup Tutorial” to hopefully answer
some of the questions about doing backups.
Or to at least express some of my own thoughts on the subject.
***********************************************************************
…

Please note that we have a whole forum for discussion of Security & Backups, and there are lots of posts there about how and when and why to create backups.

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1) Experience tells me that external HD’s are very prone to failure so that’s not
my most favorite backup media.
2) The large flash drives that we have today are excellent for data backup.

Au contraire! External HDs are much more reliable than flash drives, assuming that your external drive can be powered down when not in use. Flash drive technology is slow and relatively unreliable for writing lots of data many times, whereas external drives are improving by the day (e.g. USB2, USB3, Firewire, eSata).

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I guess I’ll just keep on trying for a little longer. Otherwise it seems like my only choice will be to purchase one of those programs you all have suggested, they seem like good choices, but perhaps a little overkill for my situation. Regardless, it doesn’t seem Windows Backup has much of a future if this keeps up…

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Another “freebie” backup program is Macrium Reflect. I liked so much that I purchased the Pro version and I am a former Acronis user.Click this link

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Another “freebie” backup program is Macrium Reflect. I liked so much that I purchased the Pro version and I am a former Acronis user.Click this link

I’ll second that. I just bought a pc with Windows 7 Home Premium and 64 bit. The FREE Macium Reflect worked perfectly and easily for both image creation (backup) and using the bootable startup disc that the program asks you to make it also restored my C Drive from the image.

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If you want a system backup, use an imaging app like Acronis or Ghost. This will enable a quick restoral of a working system.

If you want data backup, use an online backup like Mozy or Carbonite. They keep all your stuff safe in the cloud, and multiple versions of updated files in case it is not a system failure, but a user failure. Mozy is actually free for up to 2 gigs. Either is about $5/month for unlimited storage. Mozy has saved me a couple times.

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Hi,
Yesterday I ran into the same problem you describe with Windows 7 64-bit ultimate. After restoring an image I’d made of a brand new machine (testing for the inevitable), I tweaked the machine configuration some more and attempted to create a new system image. The system generated the same errors you describe. As my backup drive was nearly full, I blew away the original image and was surprised when the new space on the drive didn’t fix the problem. I purchased a larger external drive and it still had the same problem.

Long story short, I then did some Google searching and found the issue was with a hidden partition on the machine, a 100-MB hidden partition. I took their advice and turned on compression on the 100 MB partition and backup started to work. Of course, it seems I cannot find that exact link again (it was two or three pages in), but the link below describes some of the issue.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

John

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Yesterday I ran into the same problem you describe with Windows 7 64-bit ultimate. After restoring an image I’d made of a brand new machine (testing for the inevitable), I tweaked the machine configuration some more and attempted to create a new system image. The system generated the same errors you describe. As my backup drive was nearly full, I blew away the original image and was surprised when the new space on the drive didn’t fix the problem. I purchased a larger external drive and it still had the same problem.

Long story short, I then did some Google searching and found the issue was with a hidden partition on the machine, a 100-MB hidden partition. I took their advice and turned on compression on the 100 MB partition and backup started to work. Of course, it seems I cannot find that exact link again (it was two or three pages in), but the link below describes some of the issue.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/894f0901-811d-4270-955e-2962c2a4bc4d

I advise anyone using MsBackup in Windows 7 to stop doing so immediately.

I created a full backup of several hundred gigabytes to an external drive, and verified it.

Unknown to me, Windows7 then created a scheduled job to perform a weekly backup.

When this job first tried to run, the external drive was off, so the job failed.

2 weeks later I tried to restore a single file from my backup, but MsBackup reported there were no backups available, even though the external drive was on and even though I could see all the backup files the original backup had created. I believe the failed scheduled backup job may have destroyed some catalog or internal registry link to this backup, thereby rendering it completely useless.

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