I concur!

Unfortunately this X510 (that I previously identified as an EX495) never seems to reboot when I issue a reboot on the console. It shuts down and won't restart, I have to power cycle it to get it back up.

I'm wondering if the 4th drive, which I am using for the BDBB backups is causing this behavior.

Hmm, I've not seen such behavior before, sorry.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

wow, people are still running those? neat!

on-topic ... love the addon!

I am doing some initial testing of this addin that I really appreciate. I Wanted the ability to add some automation into the WHS backup, while having some "options" as to where to put those files. I selected my DB backup target and started the process.


Initial impressions:

"Store Readme in Software\Add-Ins share so user can access it" That gets a big applause from me! First for realizing that we would want to keep it there, and secondly for not just calling it readme (I do not have to rename it now to associate it with that application).


Install no issues, no errors. a very straight forward and clean interface.

I had to look around for where to access the application (probably because I am new to WHS) I first looked on the toolbar and not in the "Settings" (windows home server settings). Now that I located this thread, I can easily see where it is in the image on the OP

During backup:

After initiating the backup I monitored via RDP.

Something I noticed is that when Indexing is "on" the system can slow to a halt. The system memory consumed by the indexer service was around 250,000k while the backup was going, compared to about 16,084k at system idle (for general reference). So I am guessing that the back-up data is being indexed while it is created. I am not 100% sure, so please chime in and correct me if my initial assumptions are incorrect.


• I would make a suggestion to halt (or snooze) this service, prior to backups. I did this manually (during the backup) and it does help a lot, in my scenario.
  
  
• I am actually considering killing the service all together to be honest. Perhaps this stems from my need for speed. In any case what are the ramifications of disabling the service, does WHS depend on Indexing? Or is this a service of Windows Server 2003 that has just been left "active"?

Before I had this post written, the backup was completed (40 gigs). Small for now, but I have yet to back up everything in my home. I am still testing but on first run, no errors, a nice efficient system, I cannot ask for anything more, thank you! I really appreciate all the work that has gone into this add-in! I must say however, it is a bit shocking that MS/HP etc. have not implemented it, or a more robust backup solution in general for WHS

Best regards,
Tom

_________________
Have you backed up your data lately?

If you haven't already, check out the Automated Backup Script.

_________________
....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

Hey Tom, thanks for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate it. I'll look at the indexing service, that's a very interesting thought and anything that can speed up performance is a good thing as long as it's not detrimental to anything else.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

I continue to have major problems with BDBB running on a new Datavault X510 that I've installed. The console becomes sluggish or unresponsive and in many cases I have to kill it.

Additionally small BDBB backups of perhaps 50GB take as long as several hours to complete.

Most recently the progress bar was stuck at 16% so I ended up killing the console and rebooting the WHS. When I go back in it says that I have a backup from that date, but I'm not sure if it is useable. Is there any way to do an integrity check on the backup?

The slow console behavior is expected, and warned about in the Readme/Wiki/this forum topic. The file copy process occurs in the same process that runs the console, and the backup will die if the console is killed. This is not the ideal design and I have plans to change it, but for now this is the way it is.

The amount of time a backup takes depends on many things:
* How big the database to be copied is
* Where you are copying to (slow USB drive, server storage, network share, etc)
* What else your server is doing

Obviously given the first point above, changing things in the Console, rebuilding your Twonky DB, performing a virus scan, all these things will slow down the progress.

You can try the suggestion above about turning off indexing to see if that makes a difference.

Killing the Console and rebooting the WHS while in the midst of a BDBB backup is quaranteed to cause a bad backup. The intended (and most common) use model is to initiate a BDBB backup and walk away from the system for a few hours.

There is no integrity check, the backup DB is a closed format that to my knowledge no one has fully reverse engineered.

If BDBB isn't working well for you, you can try the manual process documented in the Backups whitepaper and even automate via script/robocopy/xcopy/etc.

I hope this helps.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Alex,

Thanks for the suggestions. The reason for the confusion is that I have been running BDBB on my own home server and have not experienced the same sort of issues. In fact I ran a backup on the problem server to server storage (better than nothing) and it completed the entire fresh backup set in under one hour.

I am now suspicious that I have a bad drive or drive bay in the X510 and will be removing it for analysis in my own machine before I try to use it on site again. An initial chkdsk /f on the disk ended up in the chkdsk reporting some problems and getting stuck after 14 hours of trying to read the disk.

One final question, is there a way to copy the backup I made onto server storage onto an external device?

Thanks

Ok, let us know what you find out about the drive. The "Server Storage" backups are located in D:\folders\{88929185-7F43-4470-9F49-EEF410C7790D}, you can copy it from there.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Thanks for the prompt reply. I think that a faulty drive or drive bay could also explain the issues I've had with rebooting when that drive is present in the system.

If I copy the contents of the sub folder you mention, where would it need to appear on another drive in order for BDBB to recognize it as a source for recovery?

Good question, create a top-level directory named "BDBB" and put the backup folder in there.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Your "slowness", jmpage2, does seem to be abnormal. BDBB does take considerable resource, (as does the Automated Backup Script) but in my experience not even close to the level it seems to be impacting you. Even using encryption and RoboCopy doesn't get close to what you describe. Noticeable on the console, yes, but not what you have going. (Or should I say "NOT going"?)

_________________
....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

I just wanted to provide a followup per my previous comments. As I suspected the extreme slowness of the console and other abnormalities related to BDBB for me was being caused by a bad Western Digital 1.5TB Green drive. I ordered a second drive and installed it this morning. All backups completed in what would be a "normal" amount of time.

If you experience extreme sluggishness in BDBB not only at the initial console but also see the progress bar for a backup completely stall out for over an hour it is entirely possible that you have a bad hard drive.

I would recommend dismounting the drive (remove it from the server) and then run chkdsk /F on the volume to see if there are problems with it. In my case chkdsk could not even complete and removal and re-addition of the primary partition also failed with errors.

I will send my defective disk back to Western Digital and chalk this up to bad luck.

Thanks for the follow-up, this is good to hear.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?