I've done some tidying up since my last posting:

1. Bought a new USB drive (same make and model), set up one big extended partition containing one big logical drive (NTFS). Now BDBB has as much room to play as it ever will have on a drive of that size.
2. Changed the USB drive's share name from S01 to BDBB.
3. The share is being USEd at the WHS end without a drive letter now.

I've done several backups onto this drive now and all have worked fine.

On a couple of occasions I have seen the message shown in the attachment. It appears when I click "New network share" then fill in the share details then press "OK", in the BDBB UI. Although it looks like an error message, there seems to be no error - at least not a fatal one. The backup has gone on successfully both times the message appeared.

Also in BDBB I am now seeing drive X: - the WHS machine's DVD drive. I think you have made changes to permit BDBB to recognise removeable drives, USB drives and the like. Personally I'd rather not see this drive in the BDBB list. It's way too small to ever be a useful backup target for BDBB. Not sure whether you can reconcile the potentially-conflicting requirements in this area.

Looking forward to getting a "proper" build, but don't see that as urgent, since all is working, as far as I can tell.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the screenshot, I'll look at the code and see what causes that message. Regarding the X drive, yes, that's the new way BDBB identifies available backup drives. I can look to see if I can detect if it's a read-only device and then exclude it from the list, but if not then I'll be leaving it the way it is now, as having the DVD drive show up is less of an issue than the previous issue of not showing some drives that really did exist.

It'll be a few days until I get this update out, got a new baby in the house, but the build you have is safe to use as I did not touch the backup or restore code, only the way the shares are detected (as we mentioned before). Thanks for your testing and the feedback!

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Alex Kuretz
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Hello,
reading here that all it takes is a quick and simple registry modification, can somebody tell me if there is any reason why Microsoft doesn't provide duplication for WHS backups already? Not even as a listed option.

That, of course, is the big question! Many of us expected it to be added long ago -- it wasn't. Undoubtedly they have a reason, but it remains unknown at this point.

But BDBB works fine...!

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Hi,

I just installed the latest version of BDBB. I have successfully backed up my WHS backups to server storage.

I have tried many times to back up to my internal backup drive, with an error stating that it could not be completed each time. Sometimes it goes further, up to ~50% complete. After the error, the internal backup drive disappears from the console and BDBB window. When I restart, there is a serious error listing and the internal backup drive reappears. The backup on that drive is obviously not complete (should be 87gb).

Here are the screenshots of the two errors in event manager, the BDBB window, and the serious error report. Most times there is only the BDBB error, this time there was also a qsm.exe error.

I have tried a couple of things: remove BDBB, reboot, reinstall BDBB, reboot, try to back up, no success
flash SATA card to updated BIOS (which the internal backup drive is connected to), install updated SATA card drivers

Any insight would be appreciated, as backing up the WHS backup to my internal backup drive is my goal!




Thanks,
Jonathan
This is a self-build WHS, with an OEM version of WHS PP1 updated to PP3.
It is an AMD Duron 1.3GHz, 640 MB RAM, on a Gigabyte motherboard
ATI All in Wonder AGP 128
SIIG PCI UltraATA 66
SII 3512 SATA/RAID PCI
Drives: IDE 120gb, 80gb, 320gb, sata 500gb

One other thing-

before I was getting VSS warnings, the last couple of times have been qsm.exe errors

Hi Jonathan,

That is indeed an unusual situation, I've not seen failures like that before. The crash looks like the drive is having some sort of failure. You've done the right steps as far as bios and driver updates, I'd probably also do as thorough of testing on that drive as possible, starting with a chkdsk and moving on to the drive manufacturers testing tools if possible. You've obviously got some old equipment so it's possible the drive has problems.

Does this drive work for other purposes, such as the WHS Share Backup feature?

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Alex Kuretz
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Well, I may have an answer.

I have the most up to date bios and driver for my SATA PCI card. To answer your question, I have backed up my limited (128MB) shares folder onto this drive without a problem. It is actually a new drive before being added to my WHS (500gb sata Wd)

I was getting SI3112 eventid=9 errors constantly during heavy disk load on the internal backup drive. This was during BDBB, chkdsk, and the WD diagnostic scan. The error was "The device, \Device\Scsi\SI31121, did not respond within the timeout period."

I looked at the info for SI3512 and SI3112 chipset SATA/RAID on google, and there may be a problem between the chipset and some onboard sound cards. So I disabled the onboard AC97 sound card, and now chkdsk and the WD diagnostic run much more quickly with only a few timeout errors.

Another unknown is the BSOD for usbport.sys that I was getting at system shut down prior to restart, which I did not know because my WHS is usually headless. Now that I have disabled the AC97 sound card, it is successfully restarting without errors.

Next up, to try running BDBB again.. More to follow!

success!! learned a lot as always along the way

so after disabling the AC97 things were much better
when I tried to run BDBB I still got a si3112 error so I stopped it to figure some things out
there were 64kb listed as bad sectors in chkdsk, but I removed the partition and recreated it then formatted, removing the marks from repaired errors

I moved the SATA PCI card to a different slot
I took all bios settings to fail-safe mode for the most part

Now- success with BDBB. No errors.

The proposed BDBB Restore to Image Functionality feature might seem redundant to most BDBB users, however, there are a number of good reasons for this feature.

This feature:

• Bypasses the maximum 10 systems backup limitation of the WHS.
• Allows for an independent Image that can be totally disassociated from the WHS Database.
• Creates a great way to preserve multiple configuration setups on the same computer.

I presume this feature would be welcomed by folks like fellow forum user burkhome
See Post subject: Backing up or Saving Individual Computer Backup
Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:18 am
See Post reply by Alex Kuretz’s

I merged your new topic into this topic, since this is where "burkhome" posted his comment that you are responding to. For reference here is burkhome's comment and my response follows it.

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Alex Kuretz
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I have enabled the duplication of WHS backups as I have had a few hard drive issues that have caused me to lose backups. While I could backup everything to another nas, I have the extra space and thought I would just enabled duplication. However, with this feature, I have two questions:

1. Does the "whs backup duplication" show up as system storage versus duplication or PC Backups? I see that this space has grown by the same size as my backups and just wanted to confirm this due to this option.

2. Will this option actually help prevent backup loss due to a disk failure? Or am I just wasting disk space.

Thanks for the help.

/Ian

Yes, it'll show up as system storage, and yes, it will prevent backup loss due to a disk failure.

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Alex Kuretz
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I had this installed briefly before uninstalling it. untill I have more drive space. The only trouble is that the client backups are still being duplicated onto the share drives. Reliable has been set to zero on the backup folder on D:, and I've even just completed a reinstall of the server drive. It's still duplicating! Any clue what could be going on?

If you did set reliable to 0, or reinstalled the OS then there's no way it should be duplicated unless it's still duplicated from before and hasn't cleaned itself up. That can take some time to completely unduplicate. How long did you give it?

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Alex Kuretz
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