I use "Drive Image" from Powerquest to do this job. I'm backing up two PC
over a home LAN to a USB 2.0 hard drive attached to one of them.
I schedule full backups nightly. In my case each needs around 13G and takes
about 45 mins (I think). DI has an option you can set to limit the number of
backups kept to prevent your disk filling up. I set it to keep three nightly
backups and one weekly for each PC. I also set it to split the backups into
600 MByte chunks so that if I have serious problems I can move the backups
around on CD/DVD.
I had two problems with this set up that were a pain to fix and which you
may also see. Neither were caused by Drive Image.
1) Norton Antivirus S/W setting the irpstacksize too small
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I've seen a few posts from people who are having problems connecting to
shares over the network despite apparently setting up their home network
accounts correctly. I believe some of these problems may be due to Norton
Antivirus S/W setting the irpstacksize too small. This can cause access
permission errors and a strange "Not enough server storage..." error.
Norton have this advisory (long URL may wrap to new line and need repair)
http://service1.symantec.com/suppor...88256d03005eb145?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam
and Microsoft have this one..
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;106167
HOWEVER they only mention the error message being "Not enough server
storage...". I found it can also give access permission errors (something
like "Access denied" or "Insufficient acesss", I can't remember exactly).
These are really confusing to someone trying to set up a home LAN.
Here is what I found...
irpstacksize = 11 (dec) causes access permission errors.
irpstacksize = 13/14 the error changed to "Not enough server storage" or
similar.
irpstacksize = 15 and my network shares now work fine.
If you look in the event log on the "server" (eg the PC hosting the share) t
here is an entry telling you the irpstacksize is too small but not many home
users know to look there.
2) Shared folders causing "Delayed write failed" errors on the remote PC
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I was getting "Delayed write failed" errors and no backup files were created
when backing up a PC over the LAN.
Some research using Google suggested that the cause might be due to
excessive network traffic caused by my use of shared folders on the USB
drive. If I remember correctly the reason given was that some kind of
notification message is sent to all computers when the content
of the share changes. In my case I was using Powerquest Drive Image to
backup a computer (PC2) over the LAN into a shared folder on PC1. This means
that the content of the shared folder was changing continuously as data was
added. In my case the extra traffic seemed to cause delayed write failure
messages..
The solution in my case was to restrict the number of machines that had
access to the share to just the one that needed it, and to push the share
down a level.
For example initially I had it set up as follows:
The folder \\PC1\Backups\ was a shared folder on an external USB 2.0 drive
on PC1.
and
backups for PC1 went into: \\PC1\Backups\PC1\ and
backups for PC2 went into: \\PC1\Backups\PC2\
I changed it so that only the folder \\PC1\Backups\PC2\ was shared.
That seems to have stopped the delayed write failures.
It turns out that DI deletes corrupt backups so that was the reason for no
partial backup files being present.
If you have similar problems and need clarification you can send me email...
Colin
--
Delete "BOX" in email to get my real address.
