Large Incremental Backups

[Peter_Sheridan]

Hello,

Symantec System recovery 2013 has been installed on a Windows 7 machine.

The machine has two hard drives.

1x 250GB SDD

1x 1TB SATA Drive.

I have a backup job that backs up the SSD Drive to the 1TB SATA. The type of backup is a Recovery Point Set. It has been running for 4 days or so now and each time it runs the incremental backups are roughly the same size as the Full backup. The full backup was 74GB and the incrementals were 73GB.

Why would this be occuring?

Thanks

Peter

[Markus_Koestler]

BEcause nearly every file on the volume being backed up is identified as having changed between the backups.

[criley]

Are you sure they are incrementals? One way to check is to look at the file extension:

v2i = full

iv2i = incremental

If they are iv2i files, it sounds like something (possibly a scheduled anti-virus scan?) is modifying a lot of sectors on the disk.

[Peter_Sheridan]

The Files are definatley v2i files not iv2i files.

The weird thing is even if i run a backup, and then another backup straight afterwards it does a full one again. So i wouldn't think its AV Scanning.

Maybe i'll try deleting the job and re adding it.

[criley]

OK, so they are full backups then.

Are you sure you created a recovery point set job and not an independent (full only) backup job?

[Peter_Sheridan]

Well i recreated the job and its still doing the same thing.

Yeah its definitely a 'Recovery Point Set' job.

[criley]

Do you have SP1 installed? I seem to recall us fixing something similar in SP1.

Check in Help/About for version details - it will show either 11.0.0 or 11.0.1

[Peter_Sheridan]

I'm running version 11.0.1.47622. So SP1 I believe :)

[criley]

Yes, that is SP1.

Can you please run fixinstall.bat (from command prompt run as admin) - you can find this here:

\Program Files\Symantec\Symantec System Recovery

Once complete, reboot the machine and try another backup.

If this does not help, please attach logs (http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH54539) and I will take a look for you.

[Peter_Sheridan]

Hey Chris,

I tried the batch file but it didn't make any difference.

Have PM'd you the logs.

Cheers

Peter

[criley · Accepted solution]

The logs suggest that incremental backups used to work:

3/11/2013 20:47:55 PM High Priority Info: Info 6C8F1F7A: A manual incremental recovery point of drive *:\ was created successfully. 0x00 (Symantec System Recovery)
3/11/2013 20:47:55 PM High Priority Info: Info 6C8F1F7A: A manual incremental recovery point of drive C:\ was created successfully. 0x00 (Symantec System Recovery)

So it was working, right? Has anything changed since this last good incremental backup?

We are now seeing this error:

8/11/2013 23:56:31 PM High Priority Error: Error EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery points for job: Drive Backup of System Reserved (*:\), (C:\).
    Error EBAB03F8: A check that safeguards the integrity of the program failed unexpectedly. 'CHECK failed, Computer::CreateImageFile: Computer.cpp(1487): guid != Guid() && sequence != 0xffffffff.'. 0xEBAB03F8 (Symantec System Recovery)
 (UMI:V-281-3215-6071)

I think this needs a support case for further investigation. Do you have a support contract?

[Peter_Sheridan]

Hey Chris, Yeah it did one incremental backup in the beginning but all others have just been full. No I'm currently using the evaluation mode. I can try and call up anyway though.

[Peter_Sheridan]

Chris,

Just an update on this - For whatever reason its started to work now! Incrementals are down to 100mb or so.

The next problem though is trying to restore....

When in "recover my files" screen, there is the option to Search in,

- File and Folder

- Recovery Point

When searching in Recovery Point it shows a lot of results.

When searching in File and Folder it doesn't show anything, it completes so fast that I dont think its doing anything...

Any ideas?

Thanks

Peter

[Peter_Sheridan]

I think I know what is going on.

Currently I am running a "Backup my computer" backup, which contains everything on the C Drive.

When a search is done through "Search in File and Folder" it doesn't search "Full Backups" it only searches "File and Folder Backups".

So the question is, how can i do a search through a full backup and use the "Show Version" option?

[criley]

So the question is, how can i do a search through a full backup and use the "Show Version" option?

I've checked this and there seems to be a limitation when doing this. From what I can tell, when searching, it defaults to searching the most recent recovery point. I cannot see a way to search all recovery points in the set - not great I know.

One way to workaround this is to mount each recovery point in Windows and do a search in Windows. This should work and the only downside is if you have a large set - it will take time to mount all the recovery points and search them all.

[Peter_Sheridan]

Thanks Chris.

That's ok - as long as i'm not missing anything.

Hopefully that feature will get released in the new version :)

Thanks again for your help.