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PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 5:10 pm 
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Thank you, the help command is all I need :)


Just for giggles, I thought I would post this:

Code:
Username@computer:~$ XCOPY /?
bash: XCOPY: command not found

:crazy: :rofl:

(Yes, yes I forgot I had to be in Windows for a moment...)

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PostPosted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 5:47 pm 
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SeaRay33, JohnBick, Yakuza

Hi ALL,

I have been lurking on this forum for quite some time, and thus far you guys have produced some very good useful information, not only to myself but to others I'm sure.

I have a few comments to make regarding the Backup / Restore of the OS. I have 7 WHS boxes here (2 haven't even been unpacked yet) all of my WHS boxes are HP Proliants ML 110 G5 - except one which is the first one (my daily driver if you like) I custom built. - all of the ML110's are essentially "crash n bash" boxes

I currently use and have been using an image created of both the C:\ + D:\ created at the same time. I have been able to restore those images successfully several times over... not just on the same day but weeks later. I use Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR), what I've done is create an Portable HDD with 2 partitions on it a bootable one and an image store. The bootable one contains the BESR disc files and of course the image store is exactly just that. to restore the image - power on machine with the portable hdd plugged in, boot the usb hdd, start the process of restoring.

On my daily driver I have the full install of BESR doing 2x daily backups to a non-pooled internal drive, this turned out to be a great feature - I lost 6 servers and 2 work stations due to some rogue software I was beta testing (I won't mention which major IT solutions Company - as they have since fixed the issue) however, they were interested to hear that I was able to recover all 6 servers, and 2 workstations in a little over 6hrs thanks to WHS... Point being one of the servers I lost was my daily driver... I had to restore the image of that first - then readd my drives then restore the backups database and all of my shares, then started looking at my servers and workstations restore. Luckily for me my production servers are all VM's hosted on a single Poweredge T610 box, so the restore was reasonably painless.

Issues...
The issues I've encountered doing a restore of an image that is several weeks / months old, this is that the Antivirus has a bit of a spack attack cos all the definitions are out of date, but that is easily fixed with a couple of mouse clicks.
also, I have found that I have to restore the complete OS drive meaning C:\ + D:\ concurrenly and then re-add other drives to the pool, then of course copy back all of my share's data from my external Backup Drive.
I also have a Backups Database that is over 300GB, My Shares total around the 500GB mark - so my external 1TB is getting very full (I'll have to think about upgrading that shortly)
A Major issue for me has been using the WHS Restore CD, there are a few things that could have been done better, a) ability to set Network Specific Address, Ability to Set IP address rather than host name to find the WHS box, Ability to add A specific RAID Controller Driver, I know it says you can... but try it!
Questions I have regarding the BDBB backup, is that from memory the first time I used it, it asked me if I wanted to backup the registry keys associated with each client (or something to that effect), What I am trying to say is that this appears to be the only significant difference between the other styles of backup db backups ( I realise that there are differences between Xcopy, RoboCopy, and RichCopy - I'm still to test RichCopy) -however I'm trying to find out exactly how/where/what these client reg keys are.. can someone enlighten me please?

WELL, I think that covers everthing I wanted to say, (and not a bad first post either hey!)

comments / questions ????


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PostPosted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 8:49 pm 
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How many drives do you have in your servers that you've been restoring? People have not had success cloning system drives in multi-drive WHS systems, and I'm even further confused by your statement that you have to re-add drives to the storage pool.

As for BDBB, I've got the links to discussions on the client registry keys documented in the Wiki, forum post, and readme. Short answer is since PP2 they are no longer necessary and that feature will likely be removed from a future release of BDBB. WHS is now able to correctly associate backups even when it doesn't necessarily know about the client.

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PostPosted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 2:19 am 
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Drives in my WHS boxes vary between 1 and several. On my crash n bash boxes there is generally only one drive in there - unless I am testing out something that requires more than one drive.

EDITED FOR CLARITY:
When I create my image I make sure that it's an image of the ENTIRE FIRST DRIVE (drive that contains the c:\ and d:\) so the resulting image has complete set of drive one. (if you have a system that has multiple drives pooled, I'd suggest making sure you've backup all the data to an External HDD...shares + Backups Database, then removing all pooled drives losing all data from them. Once that is complete and there isn't an "fs" directory under the root of C:\ then you may take an image of the entire first drive C:\ + D:\ - When freshly imaged system is backup and running again, re-add the pooled drives and then restore all shares and backup database from the external HDD.

When My daily driver crashed, which was my first DR attempt using WHS, I only restored the C:\ and that too worked. My daily driver has 2 x1TB drives pooled. - this restore happened 3 days after the image was taken.

Thanks for your comments regarding the WHS.reg Keys, I actually reinstalled it and found the "extra" folder and files that the BDBB creates - only after re-reading another thread on this forum.

Basically MY RESTORE works due to there not being any POOLED drives.

Cheers Daniel.


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 11:49 am 
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I have been using the script in its “RoboCopy” form for almost a year now, it was the perfect solution for me to automate the RoboCopy script and create a backup of the WHS itself. I had been using an external Seagate FreeAgent 750Gb Drive connected via e-STAT. This drive is designed to be a semi-permanent desktop external drive, remaining connected all the time. I had been turning the drive on and off manually to avoid excessive heat buildup which is common to these drives. But always had the script scheduled to run at 8PM each evening, sometimes I’d forget to turn on the drive and the script seemed to process just fine logging an error and terminating. After further experimentation I was able to run the sleep functions which would also shutdown the FreeAgent drive. This was working fine, the first and every Sunday (BDBB+Shares) backup took about 3-3.5 hours and each nightly (mon-sat) backup was 10-40 minutes not a bad solution, the FreeAgent was very fast. Until I started to fill up the drive, between the copy of backups and shares I was approaching the 700Gb formatted limit of the drive.

So I tried to do the same, substituting an e-STAT drive dock, using a 1.5tb drive. When I switched to the drive dock, my backup times went way thru the roof. After the change I was up to 11-14 hours for the initial and Sunday (BDBB+Shares) backups and 3-4 hours for the nightly (mon-sat). The dock is an e-SATA, so I expected at least similar or even close experience, but that does not seem to be the case. I’ve tried different drives, different sizes and speeds, I even tried using a drive I removed from the WHS drive pool, and nothing seems to help and nothing even close to the FreeAgent speed.

I wanted to switch to the drive dock so I could rotate the drives and keep an off-site copy. Now I’ve had to revert to my original setup and I face the same challenge as others opting for speed and automation over redundancy and off-site storage.

Anybody have any idea what might be causing the extreme difference in speed?


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 1:51 pm 
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I have used the script to back up to an external eSATA enclosure (single bay), to a USB-connected enclosure, and to a USB connected SATA "stand" (or "dock" -- one of those open stands designed for occasional use that allows you to easily swap the drive). While the USB is definitely slower than eSATA, I have certainly NOT experienced the performance you are describing for your eSATA connection. (I am ass-u-me-ing that your "E-STAT" should read "eSATA".)

For about 500GB of Shared Folders and 515 GB of a Backup Database a full backup via eSATA to a "virgin" disk takes me around 13 hours. (Sorry, I cannot find the paper with my notes and exact timings at the moment. I MAY have posted them above.) After that a typical Sunday takes about 3.5 hours (using XCOPY) and a weekday backup takes about 1/2 hour using XCOPY and just under an hour using RoboCopy. The exact times do vary, of course, depending on file changes the day before. (These times are current and extracted from log timestamps. They should actually be a little longer than you might experience as my target disk is encrypted and that does add a little overhead.) I have an EX475 with 2GB RAM and an LE-1640 CPU.

What do you see for performance if you perform the backup to a drive that is inserted into an MSS slot (but NOT added to the storage pool OR as a backup drive)? At the moment I's be suspicious of your dock...

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 2:03 pm 
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JohnBick wrote:
Would you like to have a process that will back up all your shared folders onto a WHS Unmanaged Disk (generally external) on a pre-arranged schedule of your choosing?...


Yes. And to accomplish that, I use SyncBack. I don't think it can be much easier than that :)
- Install SyncBack
- Select the folders you want to back up. (Enter filter settings for files/subfolders to exclude)
- Set the back up frequency.
- Select the target (local, external or FTP), and you're done.

SyncBack can even email you whenever a backup has failed or has been completed succesfully.

Just thought I'd mention it :)

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 1:21 pm 
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re: my drive dock performance issue

I did not add the drive into an internal slot or set the drive to a managed back-up as I realized I saw the same performance on another machine when writing to a drive in the docking station. Read performance was not as severely impacted and appeared to be acceptable, so I assumed it was the docking station.

I have now reconnected the docking station to my WHS machine and let it run for a few weeks. While not perfect it does now provide the functionality I was looking for. Initial Drive copy ('virgin') was in excess of 16 hours, Sunday night copy/refresh about 8-9 hours and nightly updates about 45min, all using RoboCopy to initiate the removal of deleted files. My shares folders don't change much, and therefore don't take much time, most all of this time is devoted to the copying of the backup database. I have ordered another drive to use in a swapping plan to swap out the docked drive every week, either Monday morning or Tuesday.

This appears to work for me although it's not a speedy as I would like. I really like the ability to have this process automated, which to me is more important than running the backup manually as with the DBDD add-in, in another subject here. Additionally it allows me to take a copy off site, which was the final goal for me. Now if I could work out a way to power-down to sleep mode all but Sunday night :).

thanks for the help


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 14, 2010 1:56 pm 
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ok mr bick....

well my system drive died yesterday

how can i use this robocopy script to do the reverse of what it normally does?

ie instead of backing things up from the system drive onto an unmanaged drive, how do i copy everything from the unmanaged backup drive onto the system drive?

thanks!


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:56 am 
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also, follow up...

say i switch it to copy everything from the backup unmanaged drive to the system drive...

then want to switch it back to the original code of backing up stuff from the system drive to the backup drive...

will that initial run overwrite everything all over again despite it being a perfect duplicate?

or will robocopy be smart enough to recognize the files are identical and thus, do nothing and/or only copy new files/deleted files?

thanks!


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:03 pm 
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Beun wrote:
JohnBick wrote:
Would you like to have a process that will back up all your shared folders onto a WHS Unmanaged Disk (generally external) on a pre-arranged schedule of your choosing?...


Yes. And to accomplish that, I use SyncBack. I don't think it can be much easier than that :)
- Install SyncBack
- Select the folders you want to back up. (Enter filter settings for files/subfolders to exclude)
- Set the back up frequency.
- Select the target (local, external or FTP), and you're done.

SyncBack can even email you whenever a backup has failed or has been completed succesfully.

Just thought I'd mention it :)

There are a number of solutions that work fine like that. I was specifically looking for one that would work from a command line so I could "surround" the copy operations with commands needed to mount encrypted disks. Anything that works in a command mode can be used like that; RoboCopy and Xcopy were pretty much the premier options at the time I set this up. Also any solution that would allow an external command to be run before and after the copy operations would meet my requirements as well.

There is more than one way to do things! Thanks for posting another alternative!

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:20 pm 
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Lazer wrote:
well my system drive died yesterday

how can i use this robocopy script to do the reverse of what it normally does?

ie instead of backing things up from the system drive onto an unmanaged drive, how do i copy everything from the unmanaged backup drive onto the system drive?

You would actually be recovering the entire WHS server. From a command line use the same RoboCopy command but reverse the source and target fields in the command line. (You can actually use either RoboCopy or Xcopy -- it does not need to be the same as the original.) WHS will sort out the appropriate disk during the recovery, copying the data that was missing from the failed (system disk in this case) but not necessarily actually to the system disk if there is sufficient room on other disks at this point. Only the missing data will be copied.

Another alternative would be to use the recovery built into BDBB. You will probably need to rename a couple directories depending on how you set up your targets. (Since I actually run BDBB manually on occasion I set up the default with a different naming convention.)

I have done both in testing.

Lazer wrote:
also, follow up...

say i switch it to copy everything from the backup unmanaged drive to the system drive...

then want to switch it back to the original code of backing up stuff from the system drive to the backup drive...

will that initial run overwrite everything all over again despite it being a perfect duplicate?

or will robocopy be smart enough to recognize the files are identical and thus, do nothing and/or only copy new files/deleted files?

Yes.

--------------------

Apologies to all for my lack of attention to this thread (and MANY others) over the last three months. I thought I was retired but was made a consulting offer I could NOT refuse. Very limited spare time these days!

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:28 pm 
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:offtopic:

JohnBick ~ Very Good to see you back!!!

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 12:19 am 
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Hi all,

I found this post yesterday and I would like to ask some questions to automate the backup of the backups database.

I'm thinking of buying the Cloudberry Online Backup solution to backup my duplicated shares on the WHS to Amazon S3.
But I was then wondering how I can use this solution to backup the client backups also automated to Amazon.

Then I thought about using the script here provided to schedule the database copy and then using the Cloundberry Addon to copy it to Amazon. But I also read that there is a cleaning of the whs database every sunday and so I would have to copy every monday the whole client databse again to Amazon. Is this correct, or am I missing something? Any better ideas?


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 24, 2010 8:40 am 
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How big is your backup database? You're potentially talking hundreds of gigabytes that appears to change at least weekly and sometimes nightly. Not only will that be slow to upload to S3 even over a fast network connection, but it will be expensive to store. IMHO you are better off taking regular snapshots to a hard drive and rotating it offsite for protection.

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