Reasons a volume is marked as ‘Dirty’ causing a base image (4036223)

Any time a volume is marked as “dirty” Rapid Recovery will take a new base image. This is the message that shows the volume is marked as “dirty”: 

INFO 2013-11-25T04:57:47 [431] – Replay.Core.Implementation.Transfer.VolumeTransferJob (DetermineDataToSendTask AgentDisplayName=omcolydrs-01 VolumeName=D:\
Volume is dirty or not enabled, so a base image will be performed

There are a variety of reasons that a shutdown can be considered dirty. Rapid Recovery drivers will verify each volume was shut down cleanly to determine if the base image is needed. This process means that it is possible that only one volume is seen as dirty and not all of them. Please note that Rapid Recovery cannot detect the event that caused a volume to be marked as dirty.  Here are some of the reasons a volume can be seen as dirty:

1. Changes were made to the HDD by the OS before the OS restarted fully (before Rapid Recovery drivers were loaded) – this happens most often to do repairs the OS sees as necessary. As AppAssure has no way to know what changes were made, a base image is needed to ensure the integrity of the recovery chain.
2. Rapid Recovery’s drivers (not the service) crash or are disabled; 3rd party programs can sometimes mimic this by blocking the drivers from reading a drive properly. 
3. The HDD (not the system/OS) was offline for any amount of time. This could be as short as a fraction of a second. Since the Rapid Recovery driver had no ability to check for changes, so all volumes located on this HDD would be marked as “dirty”. All another volumes would be marked as “clean” so you would see a “Base + Incremental” image. 
4. The AAlog that is used to mark changes from one snapshot to the next are corrupted or inaccessible. 
5. The OS was not able to gracefully stop all processes before shutdown.