My wife and I are cutting back on expenses, so I'm going to let my Carbonite subscription expire and rely solely on my WHS box for backups. That being said, I took a close look at what was being backed-up and what was skipped for the first time. I loaded a backup for browsing and saw that it was missing 30GB of music files! I confirmed that they were still on the desktop PC in our office, but not being backed-up. So then I went to do a configure backup and saw that in the Excluded directories list I saw "User Temp files - 31 GB" was being excluded. Due to a quirk of naming, the music was in C:\mp3\temp, presumably I was going to move it somewhere else when I put it there 3 years ago. Anyway, it appears that the WHS backup code sees the word "Temp" and skips the backup even if it's not a standard TEMP file location like C:\temp or C:\Windows\Temp.

So, lesson learned, future disaster averted, and maybe someone else will benefit from this (almost) error!



UPDATE: I also didn't mention that I poked around to try to un-exclude "user temp folders" or explicitly include a folder and did not see a way. The solution was to rename it from C:\mp3\temp to C:\mp3\music and let iTunes complain next time I try to play a song.

I wish I had read this last week. On my laptop I had a Temp folder where I put all my photos before I reviewed them and sorted them into other folders and did not realize it was not getting backed up. Laptop drive died so I got a new one and then after I did the restore these files were missing. Probably around 150 photos.

So, I'm a little miffed. Just because I call the directory Temp doesn't mean I don't want it backed up. Only files in system temporary folder should not be backed up in my opinion. Does WHS even point out that it is going to do this? Perhaps right there on the Backup Configuration Wizard would be a good place for it.

Otherwise, WHS I love you. But please don't hide details like this.

Unfortunately WHS gives you no indication that anything in a directory named "temp" will not be backed up. I'm sorry to hear of your lost files...

_________________
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?

When I saw Tadowguy's post I immediately renamed a couple of my "working" folders.

Being paranoid, and those folders being rather key to my life, I also synchronize those folders to Shared Folders so would only have been (very) frustrated had I needed them. You wouldn't, perchance, have those files in a Shared Folder would you Kjpublic01? (Just hoping you might have forgotten they were there!)

_________________
....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

Unfortunately they are not in the shared folder. I've always thought of the shared folders as stuff to share with the whole family. However, I should have at least created a copy under my folder in the User's share (perhaps synched with SyncToy) but alas that is not the case.

Live & Learn...

Wow! This is scary. I just checked my backups and there is one folder under the D: drive on my main PC named Temp which was not backed up at all. There was also a sub subfolder under one of the subfolders on the D: drive named Temporary File Storage which was backed up.

I just realized/encountered another possible side-effect of this behaviour. Some programs (e.g. NIS) seem to store downloaded files to be run at the next boot in temp folders. If you restore from an image that is expecting an .msi file in a temp location to be present at boot, you're bombarded with error messages until you manually resolve the problem yourself.

Not being able to disable temp directory skipping is the difference between a completely painless recovery and one that I have to spend my time at tinkering around to get back to normal.



Frustrated,

Chris P.

Ouch.... Hadn't run into that but I can definitely see how it could occur!

I would actually suggest this might be a good one for a MS Connect bug report...

OK, hackers, any way to enable the backup of "temp" directories???

_________________
....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

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is "NIS"?

I expect it's Norton Internet Security.

_________________
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?

In looking into this I believe there are other programs that create "temp" sub-folders. Some seem to contain updates; some seem to contain "variables" (a'la .ini files); some use them for "unfinished" business.

I played with a couple of them and if they are missing they are recreated --- BUT settings were lost and, in one case, some changes to a working file as well. (In this particular test the file had intentionally NOT been formally "saved" prior to shutting down the application.)

Something interesting to keep an eye on. Surprised no one really mentioned this (that I recall) during the WHS beta a couple years back...!

_________________
....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

Yup, NIS = Norton Internet Security. Should've been more clear...