Another showstopper bug (was: I Give Up)

Help - CB
#1

I’m giving up on Comodo backup, while I love that it’s free, and the it’s feature set is very good, the fact is, it doesn’t work.

I’m trying to do a simple, scheduled incremental copy, of some folders on my C:\ and D:\ to an external HDD I:. I set it to do incremental files and folders, as a simple file copy to my external HDD, and set it to run when the system is idle 60 minutes. I’ve tried both Service Run, and Silent run, same thing.

I’ve run through the “backup creation wizard” multiple times including deleting backups from the manage tab to make sure I only have ONE backup configuration setup and then recreating them again from scratch… After doing this numerous times, I know it’s not me, it’s gotta be the app.

Every time it runs fine for the initial backup, but afterwards it either:
Fails to run again (No errors, it just doesn’t run).
Runs again but has changed to a “Full backup” and therefore recopies EVERY file every time, not just files that changed.
Runs again but decides to backup to the default comodo backup folder, not my chosen I:.
Runs again but forgets that I enabled the creation of the directory tree, so all the files get dumped into the root of I:.
Or just other random things it decides it wants to do. Yet if I go into the backups configuration, it has the right settings, it seems to just “forget” them.

As a test I just ran through it again, it says:
I:\ Backed up sucessfully.
C:\Users\MatthewH\Backups\backup_inc_files is scheduled to run soon. Yet this is NOT the folder I picked and all other tasks we’re deleted before creating the new one.

Whats the point of a backup program, if it has a mind of it’s own?

I really hope someone knows why it’s doing this, or Comodo is able to fix these bugs, because if it worked right, it’d be a great app.

#2

I’m having the same problem. Glad to know I’m not alone

#3

Hi

The issues you enumerated were reported to our QA department and they will be fixed in the next release.
We are sorry for the inconveniences.

Thanks

#4

When is the next release slated for?

#5

A BETA for the next release will be out very soon.

Thanks

#6

I agree with you Matthew. First I was having issues changing my default backup location. Seems it has been fixed in v3.0 now however File Synch does not work with Mapped network drives and my GUI is messed up inside the Comodo Backup Program.

On the Backup Tab, Under the New Backup Option I see 3 more options.

Documents Backup (backup my documents folder)
Media Backup (backup my music, my picture and my videos)
User Backup (backup paul folder)

However, the buttons to schedule a backup are missing and the backup now buttons are missing.

Free is nice and all when it works.

#7

Can you please post a screenshot with this issue?

Thanks

#8

I just installed Comodo a few days ago. It looks like an awesome program, but either I am totally stupid, or the program does not work.

I had the same issues as the person who posted. I have done a full backup of the 0 disc which has my c drive and my d drive. It works fine, but when I try to do the incremental it backs up everything again. I had a live PCsupport guy set it up for me, but it did not work again. I have gone through the settings over and over. I tried to do a back up now with incremental backup of disc 0, but it comes up with an error code of 101784.

Overnight a backup ran, that was suppose to be incremental, but it backup everything again. I hope that I am just stupid, and if anyone wants to say so with instructions of what I am doing wrong, I will be happy to keep trying, otherwise I will try something else. This shouldn’t be brain surgery.

All I want to do is to set up an incremental backup of my drives, C, D, Y, E everyday. According to the help menu you must set up a full first, but the PC Live tech set up the backup for me starting with incremental and said this is the correct way to do it.

Thanks for any help, much appreciated.

#9

Bear with me for this. The best way to describe what happens with incrementals is to work out what is happening once the job is running and then work backwards.

Imagine we have an incremental backup job set up that is first run on Monday, and then runs on a daily basis thereafter. Jumping forward in time, when it runs on Wednesday, it compares the list of objects to be backed up with the current state of the drives/disks/folders/files. The difference (what has incremented between Wednesday and Tuesday) is what gets written out as Wednesdays backup job.

Now we need to look at what happened when the job ran on Tuesday. It compared what it backed up on Monday (the first time the job ran) with the current object list.

This leaves one question - what did the backup have to compare with when it first ran on Monday?

When we setup an incremental job, the first time it runs, it has no previous list to refer to, so it will do a full backup. The logic behind this is - if my object list is blank, then EVERY specified object in the backup job is new and therefore needs to be backed up. This is the FULL backup referred to in the HELP file.

It does not mean that you have to do a separate FULL backup first and then set up an incremental job.

It does mean that the first time an incremental job is run, it has nothing to compare to, so it will backup everything. The second and subsequent times it is run, it will compare the object list created on the first run to the current state of the object list and backup the difference.

All you need to do is setup an incremental job, define the list of drives/disks/folders/files to be backed up, tell it how often to run the job and that’s it.

Hope that helps,
Ewen :slight_smile:

#10

Hi Ewen, thanks so much for the explanation. It makes sense, and I think I understood all of that, but I just completed an incremental of my disc 0 which has the C-drive and the D-drive. As a test, after the incremental backup completed, I did nothing to add any files to disc 0, and did a manual backup using the same incremental profile. I assumed it would only take a few minutes, maybe 10 or 15, but it is estimated over 3-hours. There is 124 gigs used on C and there is 203 gigs used on D.

Is it normal to take over three hours to do an incremental when nothing has changed. According to the log it is making an incremental, but something still seems wrong.

Thanks again, maybe I just have things ■■■■■■■ up. I am frustrated, but I hate to give up.

#11

It takes that long because it reads the entire source again.

This is because disk/partition incremental backup is performed at sector level and there isn’t a time stamp to compare if a sector was changed or not.
Files & directories incremental backup take pretty much the same in 3.0 version, but in the next version it will take 10-15 minutes for 124 gigs of files if not much was changed.

Thanks

#12

I’m glad to see many of the bugs are fixed (I tried 4.0.3), but there still seems to be one glaring bug IMO.
I set it up as an incremental backup, using a simple copy. Problem is it doesn’t copy the folder tree exactly. Some of them it does the tree properly, others it skips the most of the tree, ex:
d:\music\artist\album* copied properly, ending up with F:\Comodo Backup\music\artist\album*

But others for example h:\firefox* it dumped the contents to the backup folder, without creating the firefox directory. It did this with other folders too.

so i got F:\Comodo Backup\cache, F:\Comodo Backup\extensions, etc, instead of F:\Comodo Backup\firefox\cache and F:\Comodo Backup\firefox\extensions.

Why does it only mess up on some?

Edit: one thing that may help the authors [at] comodo track this down is, the files and folders selected during the initial backup creation do not exhibit this bug, only files and folders added later do. Is there a bug with adding things later?

#13

Well, when it ran today it ■■■■■■■ up again. I really hope Comodo fixes this bug soon or can tell me what I’m doing wrong.

#14

So, you selected the entire “h:\firefox” folder as source , simple copy, incremental backup saved it as profile or schedule, then ran it a few times. Then you edited the schedule/profile to add new items and the destination wasn’t created properly?

If you can please post screenshots with what you selected initially, what you selected when you edited the profile, how the destination looked initially and how the destination looks after editing and running the profile, it would be more helpful.

Thanks