Yes, I have heard of "whole house" surge protection. I have actually installed a couple MOVs in my breaker box to catch the lightning transients but still use UPS units on my electronics. I have a couple UPS units with batteries that are extremely marginal that I still use for their surge protection abilities on some secondary units -- e.g., TV sets. I also have a couple surge-protected "power strips". I do not rely on the "whole house" solution.

And you need to protect the phone line, LAN and cable as well. In theory you should protect each "leg" of the LAN (each input to each switch and each router) but I really only protect the "long runs", not all the connections behind the desk.

But we're getting off-topic here!

_________________
....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 use a Square D Surgebreaker Plus Multi-Path whole house surge protector. All electrical, phone and coax are run through it before going on to the rest of the house. Each device or group of devices are additionally protected by surge protectors at the electrical outlets. As for UPS devices with failing batteries; you can replace the batteries in those with fresh batteries. The batteries in those things are standard lead-acid batteries. You may need to solder the connectors to the battery, but that should be no big deal.

Thanks for the link, cavediver. I need to look into this. It is nice to see how others are dealing with lightening strikes and other abnormalites with electrectal power.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I really hate to report this here and I am not sure what is happening or if it has anything to do with my command file. But after all the work performed over the last several days to chkdsk each disk containing a backup and copying an old verson of my BDBB database back to my server, I am now looking at the identical problem I was faced with before. Screenshots look the same and backup database is not available to me (which defeats the primary reason I bought my MSS in the first place).

I have no alternative but to stop doing my automated backup each morning until I can get to the bottom of this problem. I am so sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

I am going to go now to turn off the scheduled backup for tomorrow morning. The first thing I will do to test is to copy the BDBB I have from my BDBB backup this morning back over to the server. I know this backup was good because the I looked at the home computer backup list this morning after the command file was run. If copying the BDBB from this morning fixes the problem, will just wait to see if the problem occurs again over the next week or so. If the problem does not occur, I will start the daily backups again. If it does occur right away, then I will know the problem is not related to the automated server backups and I will restart them immediately and look else where for the source of the problem.

Bear with me for a while while I work out this problem. I will report back here what I find out, if nothing else to either clear or point to the automated backups as the source of the problem. Honestly, I don't really see how they could be the problem because copying a file should not in anyway corrupt it. My guess is the problem is more related to the removing/additon of the external drives and some mistake I made in doing so. I will get back when I know more.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

Now I am completely confused. I started looking into copying the BDBB backup to my server. But before I did that, I went to the console and looked at the two screens (the Computer Backups Tab and the Backup section for Settings) and they are completely back to normal. I am completely stumped at what is causing these two screens to change. In addition, I occasionally get File Conflict Notificaition messages from the WHS icon in the system try and it is yellow, not green all the time. When I check the console the heatlth monitor is green (clear sailing). I really have no idea what to do or NOT to do at this point. I guess I just wait to see what happens. There is clearly something wrong with my server or there is a bug in WHS or somthing, but I have no idea what it is.

George

Update: ten minitues after I wrote the above, I now see a yellow Network at Risk icon for the health monitor in the console. File conflicts and Backup Database errors are being reported. The backup tab in the Console and backup section in Settings section of the Console look normal. Go figure

Now it appears my Photos Share Folder has a Failing (check health) status. I am just going to wait and watch. At the rate things are happening, the system will just go back to normal in a hour or so. I have never seen my server do things as strange as the things I have see "happen" to it over the last three or four hours. Now I am beginning to supsect a virus. Excuse my French, but what in the heck is going on?
Edit:Typos

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I would probably be suspecting a failing disk...

Either way, I am totally convinced this is NOT caused by either BDBB or the Automated Backup Procedure.

_________________
....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 suspect you are right John, about it not being a problem with BDBB or the Automated Backup Procedure.

Well I checked every single thing I have mentioned in this thread (as having been wrong before). Now they are all right. Green every where, no indications of failure anywhere. All hard drives are not only reported healthy by both WHS Disk Managment and the Console Server Storage Tab, but Disk Management Add-in does not even predict a failure of any drive.

The only thing I have done since my last post is to turn duplication back on for all the shares and reboot the server. I guess the status will change in a hour or so. I hope it does not change but a part of me wants to find out why this has happened. Otherwise I will never know.

This is probably the last post I will make here for a while. I will just wait and see what comes up next
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

JohnBick I want to report back on what I have found with my BDBB issue. Of cousre, anyone else in addition to JohnBick, please feel free to comment if you see anthing I could be doing wrong. I am reluctant to raise this point here in this thread, because I still do not see why running a script that copies a file can cause the BDBB to get messed up. Maybe you can help me diagnose what is happening here and we can eventually illiminate the batch file as the problem. I hope you can. It is probably something I am doing that causes this problem but it definitely seems to be batch file realted. Allow me to explain.

After my last post this past Wednesday, my server ran without errors for three full days. Saturday, as soon as I mannually ran the batch file on the server (and watched it run in a DOS window while processing) right after completion of the Xcopy command in the batch file (that copies the BDBB from the server) the server shut down. Lights were normal in one second and completely off in the next. I booted the server and looked at the same two screens I reported in this thread on Sunday, June 14th at 2:36 PM. The problems as shown in these two referenced screenshots were back. I tried a BDBB repair but that did not fix the problem. I did nothing else because I have found in the past that if running the repair does not work then the problem is usuallly fixed after the home computer backups have run their normal course overnight. In this case on Saturday I did check back about 4 hours later and the problems in both screens had gone away. Of course, the problem is if during that time I had needed to get to a backup I would not be able to.

I am now running the batch file daily but with the BDBB portion of the batch file remarked out. No further problems have occured but, of course, my BDBB is no longer backed up daily now either. I am reluctant to run the batch file with the XCOPY command and the Net Stop of the BDBB and restart again. If you or anyone else has any ideas why this might be happening, please chime in.

Here is the XCOPY command I am running to produce the BDBB backup.

XCopy D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} G:\Backups\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4} /D /E /V /C /I /G /H /R /K /X /Y >C:\Temp\External-Backups.log

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I have been using the robocopy version of the script for some time now without issue. Recently my PC backups have been failing with an Invalid Handle error.

My working theory, based on a very, very small amount of research, is that one of the long running robocopy file copies and the drive balancer (name?) are tripping over each other and leaving an invalid file reference. Plausible?

On that note, is there an easy way to delete my backup database, so my PC backups will run again? I have tried the backup cleanup and repair options, but neither will complete. I am not too worried about losing my backups - I suffer from backup paranoia and have several redundant copies of my files on different drives/machines.

Thanks!
Mike

Let me think on this one. In the meantime maybe someone else can contribute.

I have been running the XCOPY version (automated), the ROBOCOPY version (automated), and the BDBB Add-In (manually) for several months now without a hint of a problem. I also believe that Yakuza/Alex has been running BDBB without problem for even longer. Personally I believe there is some other factor in there causing your shutdowns. But how do we isolate it...? THAT is going to require some thought!

_________________
....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

Is the automated backup running at the same time as the nightly backups? If it is, change the run time to a time well after the nightly backups complete. Otherwise I cannot personally see the "balancing process" causing such an error UNLESS there is some other problem in there. I would probably shut down the MSS and test the drives in another machine, one at a time, using "CHKDSK x:\ /F /R" at a command prompt. The copies are being made to a drive that is OUTSIDE the "storage pool" and they are only being read from within the pool.

As for the Backups... You might first try Console-->Settings-->Backup-->Repair. If that fails I believe you can "Remove Computer" on the Backup tab of the Console. (I don't believe I have ever done it that way...) Another way is to install the WHS Toolkit and, in there, go to the Backup tab and do the "Backup Database Reset". (I am not sure if that function is in the current version of the Toolkit -- a few functions were removed in the latest version.)

By the way, paranoia is good in this business...!

_________________
....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 Mike... Welcome to the forum. I'm glad you are here.

I am not the best person on this forum to answer you questions about Drive Extender (DE) and RoboCopy file copies "tripping" over each other. My guess would be that is not happening. We can talk more if you like about that, but lets concentrate on what error you are getting in the event logs when you backup/cleanup fails to complete. I start here, because that is, IMHO, the place to start instead of deleting your backups. To answer you question, however, the PC backup files are in the folder I refernece in my previous post (the one XCOPY is copying) Deleting that folder would delete your backups. I have no idea what other things that might do to your server, however, so I don't recommend you do that.

Can you show screen shots of the event log errors that occur when the backup/Cleanup fails to complete? If I can't help you we may have to bring in the big guns or maybe they will repond to your screenshot post anyway.

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I completely understand, so don't worry about answering right away. I did, however, want to provide a bit more info. Without getting into the details of when/how this error was produced (yet) I think it may be related to the issue I am having.

Here is the System Event Log error I am referring to:

Client Backup server failed at d:\wssg_src\whs_pp2\qhs\src\backup\util\datafile.cpp(890)

I have no idea what that means and I have not approached MS about it yet to find out more.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

SeaRay33 and JohnBick -

Thank you for your replies. I think I have it working now...or I have made it worse. The invalid file handle error message was on the file D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}\M.C.VolumeClusterLatest1.4096.dat

I deleted this file, then tried the backup cleanup and repair utilities again. This time they worked. I also did a manual backup and that worked as well.

Everything seems back to normal. I am a little concerned that something may be missing due to the file I deleted though...

Thanks again,
Mike

These are the error messages from the event viewer:
Message1:
Unexpected error 0x45d from ReadFile on D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}\M.C.VolumeClusterLatest1.4096.dat: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.


Message 2:
Client Backup server failed at d:\wssg_src\whs_pp2\qhs\src\backup\util\diskfile.cpp(449)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

In addition, the failed backup entries had a message similar to message 1, but it said invalid file handle rather than I/O error. Unfortunately, I do not have the exact task as I cleaned out the failed backups.