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PostPosted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 4:24 pm 
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DID I KILL MY SERVER? PLEASE HELP! Okay – I now realize I didn’t kill it, but really thought I was close!)

I hope someone can help. I have an EX 485 and, up until recently had the original 750gb hard drive in there. Things have been pretty fine since I’ve had it. Over the past few months, though, I’d keep getting the message that my hard one hard drive was unhealthy and I should repair. The message would go away on its own however, not due to anything I’d done. I decided it was time to at least get another hard drive in there for the inevitable death of that original.

I bought 2 Western Digital 1tb drives. One about two weeks ago – added it to storage, no problems. Then, just today installed a second identical WD 1tb drive. At first I thought I wanted to install it to use as backup, but got the message that it needed to be partitioned. I searched the forums and threads, saw that it was possible, but I am not very expert, so instead I just decided to add it to my storage and turn on Folder Duplication for all my folders. I don’t have that much on my server, mostly music and photos, I think it was about 220gb all together. So after installing the 2nd new hard drive, I had 2 new 1tb drives and the original 750gb. I turned on Folder Duplication, knowing it would take a while. I watched under the “Server Storage” tab as the “duplication” piece of the storage pie increased and finally matched the amount of my data. All seemed well.

As that Folder Duplication was taking place, though, I was also reading forums and threads about both my “unhealthy” original hard drive and about backups. After installing the first new WD 1tb drive two weeks ago I decided to enable backups for the two pcs in my network, mine and my wife’s. There’s really not much critical data on them, as I keep that stuff on my server. But, now that I had the space, it seemed like a good idea. However, after reading about how silly it was to do daily backups of my local pcs, I decided to go in and stop the backups, thinking I would just run them myself on a weekly or every-ther-week basis. So I stopped the backups for both pcs. Then, in looking at the Server Storage tab, I saw that the backups the server had done in the past two weeks took up almost 150gb. That seemed excessive. I decided to delete all the old backups the server had created over the past two weeks. The warning came up that the cleanup could take a few hours – I figured only 150gb wouldn’t take all that long, so got the process started. It was moving along smoothly until it got to 43% complete and then totally hung. During that time everything on my network was incredibly slow, and I could not access my music through my SqueezeBox server add in, nor could I access my files or e-mail archive located on the server. I let it sit there for at least 2 or 3 hours, then closed the Home Server Console. Clearly a mistake.

At that point I lost all access to the server. I could not login via the Console, got the message there was no communication. I also tried getting in via Remote Desktop Connection, no luck. I could ping the server using the DOS/Command Prompt and the server’s ip address, but no access to it at all. At this point I started getting really nervous. I thought perhaps if I just gave it more time, perhaps it simply needed to finish the cleanup of the backups I had started. But 2 hours later, I still had no access from either PC (though my pc, the one from which I had been using the console, had the system tray server icon grayed out, while my wife’s pc had the system tray icon green). Finally I decided to do reboot the server.

I tried a soft reboot, just pressing the server’s power button briefly, but nothing happened. I know a hard reboot is not the best thing for the server, but it didn’t seem like I had much choice. I pressed and held for 4 seconds and off it went. I gave it a few minutes to calm itself, the turned it back on. I waited with baited breath, certain I had ruined everything. Eventually it all came back up, and I was able to log in to the console. It took a while for the Server Storage tab to calculate everything, and the console was very slow in general. Finally it was clear I had duplicated all the folders as I had 219gb listed for both my Shared Folders and Duplication. BUT – The server’s right light was RED, and I now have a “Network Critical” message.

So the red light is on and my “network critical message” is that “The backup database has errors.” It wants me to “Run the Backup Database Repair Wizard.” I assume this is because I either closed the console or rebooted while the deletion of those backups was still in progress – does that seem likely and/or accurate?

When I click “repair” I have to check the box next to the warning message that says “I understand that I might permanently lose some backups while attempting to repair the backup database.” Considering I’ve decided the backups aren’t that important to me, I’m thinking this doesn’t really matter. But, it also warns me that the wizard may take several hours to finish. I’m nervous about starting this process, and having it hang totally like it seemed to earlier, leaving me in the same place I am now.

I guess one question is, can I safely ignore this “network critical” message? There doesn’t seem to be a way “ignore this warning” to bring the server back to “healthy” status as there is with some other messages.

Any suggestions most welcome. I know only enough about how the server and software work to be really dangerous!

Sorry for the length of this post, but I wanted to make sure I covered everything that happened prior to this point.

Thanks!


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 8:47 pm 
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Since you want to delete your client backup database the easiest way I know of is to use the ADD-IN BDBB which has the option to do that. BDBB is available for download on this site from the ADD-INS Tab above.

I personally would allow the clients to get their daily backups and after the 1st backup the rest are incremental. Client backups really shine when you need to perform a client recovery. The 150GB you mention is actually quite small for a client backup database. How you chose to protect your clients is up to you but I can tell you WHS, WHS2011 and WS2012 all do a great job with client backup and recoveries and its really in my opinion the best part of having these solutions available to us and the rest of what you can do well that's just a sweet added bonus.

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