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General discussion

ghost 2003 taking forever

Jan 28, 2005 4:14AM PST

Recently when trying to make a backup with ghost 2003, the program indicated it was going to take over 10 hours to complete the backup of 20g of information. I am using Windows XP and backing up to a second hard drive which has plenty of room. I'm also using maximum compression. At the first part of Dec., I made a backup which took about 1 hour to complete. I've added another 2gb of software since then. I have Systemworks 2005, but reverted to ghost 2003 when I couldn't get 9 to work and had no success contacting Norton. Both drives are NTFS.

Discussion is locked

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Seems a bit long
Jan 28, 2005 6:42AM PST

I use Drive Image and 10 gigs of data take less than 15 minutes. Restore time is 1/2 of that so your time seems long. To what sort of media are you copying to? I go from HD to HD using internal drives but, if I create the backup on an external (USB2) the time is considerably greater...about an hour. Your processor speed and drive interfaces are major factors. Tell more about these.

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ghost backup taking too long
Jan 28, 2005 11:11PM PST

My processor speed is 3.2. The drives are IDE and I'm going from internal HD to internal HD. This is a new occurence. Both backups I did in December and those previous took no more than an hour, and I've only added about 1.5 gb. of programs since. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing both systemworks and ghost and I've also restored using the backup from early December that had taken only an hour to create. It took over 5 hours to restore,(which is also longer than usual) and everything seems to work ok since the restore. Any help is appreciated.
Nancy

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This is a poser
Jan 29, 2005 10:05AM PST

I have no personal experience with Ghost but, since Symantec bought PowerQuest who made the product I use (Drive Image), I was presuming the two should be similar in performance and operation. Ghost 9 is supposed to incorporate the Drive Image technology so I need to be curious as to what problems you had with it. Hopefully, someone else here will pick up on your problem is we can just get a few more questions answered. So, here goes. Do you run Ghost from Windows or using a floppy set? Drive Image can use either. Are you having any performance problems with the PC otherwise? I also have to wonder if the drive you are backing up to is operating at it's potential...that it is properly recognized and not using PIO mode. Try transfering a very large file (even an image) from one drive to the other and back. See if the time required is very long for a file of a couple gigs or so. Are the drives in a master/slave relationship with each other. If so, you might try changing one to the other IDE port and testing there. Since the imaging process will be very CPU intensive, I also wonder if heat is causing it to scale back it's speed. Your 3.2 ghz should be a touch faster than my 3.0 and should be able to process close to 1 gig of data per minute. I get over 800 mb usind DI. Post back more info as there are some real Ghost fans here. Good luck.