My understanding is that the WHS backups of clients are a proprietary MS format, so even if you had them you probably couldn't use them without WHS. As for extracting them, I'm not sure that is possible. Alex built his BDBB add-in so that users could back up their back-ups so that if the server died, you could salvage the backup you had made. Of course, this only works if you are backing up the back-ups on a regular basis.

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X510 w/7 TB (100% WD Green EARS)
Stock Processor, 4 GB Memory Upgrade

Forgive me if I'm taking this the wrong way, but your response comes off as extremely arrogant. This product is meant for the average joe to set and forget. As such, people are not always going to use the best practices. The answer to your burning question of why I need the client backup data is because it is the only copy of some of my data. Specifically, I had backed up an external drive to it, and some of the data was removed from the original. Having a healthy client machine is not going to do a damn thing for that. As a matter of fact, by default, the WHS will take an image of every drive you have attached to a client machine, so it was designed to work this way. If it is not the best practice, well that's not the fault of the user, it's the fault of HP and/or Microsoft for doing it that way. How is the end user supposed to know what's good to do and what's bad? They buy an MSS because they *don't* know.

I will tell you what I told Daveed, if there is no solution and you can't retrieve the backup data off of the drives, then just say so. We could play coulda, woulda, shoulda, all day. I'm not looking for your opinion on whether or not I used the best practices with the WHS. I asked a simple question that requires a simple answer - How do you get the client backups off a failed machine? If the answer is "you can't" then so be it. I don't need anyone telling me I'm doing it wrong because that's now what I asked.

Little Mike, I understand you are frustrated but try to realize that everyone posting here is trying to help you, and several people have spent a fair bit of time trying to understand the problem and sharing their best thoughts and ideas. It may not be everything you want to hear, but the community is trying to help you.

To my knowledge no one has successfully reverse engineered the WHS Backup Database. This individual has come the closest that I have heard of but I've not tried his tools and do not believe they are complete.

The only way you will be able to get your Backups is:
1) Get your server working
2) Get your backup database on another WHS system. This could be a borrowed system, or a spare PC running the WHS demo (I think the demo should work though I've not tried it).

If your system boots, then I suspect it can be recovered. We need to know what spare hardware (drives) you have, what you have tried during the restore, what error messages you see, the LED behavior when the server boots, etc.

It could also help to add your location to your profile, perhaps someone is near you that would be willing to help.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Hi Alex,

Thanks for the response. Obviously the WHS failure is the root of my frustration, but also understand that I asked a simple question about whether or not I can mount the storage drives and recover the full backups. Instead of getting a simple answer of "No. That's not possible without another WHS," I get questioned as to my usage of the server or why I even want the backups. Telling me the full backups are only for disaster recovery (which is wrong due to the VSS feature of being able to restore individual files/folders that MS incorporated into the WHS) is not only adding to my frustration but also giving people incorrect information. I think Daveed and I just had a misunderstanding and I appreciate his trying to help, though he couldn't give me the answers I sought. With that said, here are my latest results:

I mounted one of the storage drives to a desktop to see if I could pull anything off and noticed there was a 20 GB partition with a Windows install in it. After further investigation, I discovered it was actually a WHS install. So I popped it by itself into the WHS and it booted up. I had already uninstalled the Connector software so I tried to do a Server Recovery. That partially worked. Right now it sees the partitioned storage drive as the System drive. I popped the other storage drive in, and it recognizes that as one of the 2 storage drives I had in it, however, it shows no backups and only empty share folders.

Oddly enough, it shows the system drive (which is actually one of the original storage drives, like I said) as the same name as the failed System drive, though it reads the size of the drive correctly. So basically in Server Storage I see this:

ST3705630AS 1.36TB Internal (ATA) Bay 1
WDC WD15EADS-00R6B0 1.36TB Internal (ATA) Bay 2
WDC WD15EADS-00R6B0 1.36TB External (ATA) - Missing

Originally I had the Seagate 750GB that came with the machine as the System disk and 2x WD Green 1.5TB's for storage. It looks like it's interpreting the one storage drive as the Seagate but reading the size correctly and instead telling me one of the storage drives is missing, though technically it's the original system drive is missing. What I *think* happened is that when the Seagate died and I tried a Server Recovery (not yet knowing the drive was dead), it partitioned one of the storage drives and installed the OS on it. So now it's confused thinking the storage drive is the Seagate and it's not able to access the data actually stored on it in the other partition. At this point I'm ready to call it quits and chalk it up to experience.

I hope all that info helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Mike

Mike if you take a PC with 500 GB of data on it and back it up on your WHS, it Does NOT occupy 500 GB of data on the WHS it is compressed and may only occupy 250. GB of data, or maybe even less. If you take three PCs each with 500 GB worth of data and back them up to the WHS, the backup data does not occupy 1.5TB of data, nor does it occupy 750 GB of data, it may only occupy say 500 GB of data. WHS not only compresses data, but it looks for common chucks of data at the disk level. This means it is impossible to simply mount the drives on a PC and directly read the backup data from the drives. Does that answer one question for you? The backup data is treated different than data in the shared folders. A file that is zero bytes in size in the shared fiolders may actually consume much more than zero bytes in the shared folders. It is possible to mount the hard drives on a PC and directly read and recover a file stored in the shared folders area, This is not possible for data that has been backup. Is that answer to one of your questions?

Now just because it is not possible to directly read it on a PC does not mean it can't be recovered. However to recover it will take effort, and money. (if you are willing to spend enough time and money you can do almost anything ~ men have gone to space). I atempted to ask this of you in our first conversation you would NOT answer it. Not because I want your money, but because it effects the answer.

It's gone....

Sorry

Previous Versions (VSS) is disabled on OEM versions of WHS. It is possible to turn them on but by default they are off.


Is this the system drive or another drive? If you try to add a WHS system drive to the storage pool, bad things happen, see this topic for more info.



I think I agree with you. If you can find all the backup files you can copy them manually into place on the server after you do the fresh install, but unless you have all the files you'll likely lose some or all of your backups.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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To my knowledge WHS does not compress data stored in the backup database. It does perform incremental backups and single instancing storage at the block level, which is what you're describing that allows multiple computer backups to take up less space than the sum of their used disk space.

There's a decent overview of how backups work in WHS here.

_________________
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? If so, be sure to Rate them at WeGotServed.

In my experience one PC containing 500 GB of data backup to the WHS once does not result in the WHS console reporting in server storage a backup database equal to or greater than 500 GB. My understanding is WHS not only records each sector of a disk, but information as to where on the disk that information is located. To my mind if one can store more than 500 GB of data in less than 500 GB of space, then some form of compression is being used.

Perhaps it is word games here? Perhaps you would find it more agreeable to say a byte of data on the PC does not result in a corsponding byte of data, plus tracking bytes of data being used on the WHS? That one PC with our 500 GB of data, with 30 complete images of that data on 30 different days does not result in (500 GB x 30 days) 15,000 GB of data being used on the WHS? Or perhaps I am indeed wrong, and it does result in over 15,000 GB being used. Perhaps our friend really can locate and recover all his backup data by simply looking in the right spot, with his PC?

Or perhaps it is all smoke and mirrors, and nothing at all is really backup, certainly there have been enough reports of people having issues when attempting to do a bare metal restore! There are even reports I believe of people with issues when simply attempting to read a file from the backup database?

Incremental backups means only changed blocks are backed up. Single Instancing means a block is only stored on the server once no matter how many PCs have that same identical block of data.

Your example of the 500GB PC is more likely smaller due to the automatically excluded files and folders such as pagefile, hibernation file, Recorded TV directory, temp directories, etc.

It is possible we are arguing semantics here, but in my view "compression" would mean acting on the data to make it smaller, not just being selective and efficient about what is actually backed.

_________________
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? If so, be sure to Rate them at WeGotServed.

I've had a similar problem as littlemike. Ex495 failed. Tried all options to fix. No luck. It appears that one of my three additional WD Green drives that I added to the server failed. Isolated and removed the drive. Now the system boots but can't access the console. Can't remote desktop. Can't reset.

The reason that I need to data from the backup files is because a hard drive failed on a computer that was being back up by the home server. I had a dedicated hard drive that contained my family photos. Effectivey, I had two failed drives on two systems within a day.

If I get another EX495 and plug in two of the three drives from the old server, will the backups be found and can the data then be restored to a new drive? I am only concerned with one specific hard drive that was on one of the four computers that was being backed up. Is there another way to do this?

I realize that there might be costs involved, but I'm talking ten years of pictures.

Help/ideas greatly appreciated!

Hi awt3. So sorry to hear about your troubles.

What is not really clear is that after the failed drive was removed what exactly happend to the server? Do you lose connectivity meaning has the LAN Port Failed or is there break in the network connection between the server and the router? You indicate the server boots up ok and this tells me your not seeing any issues with the health light. If this is true then it comes back to connectivity issues which can be resolved by installing a Debug Cable and once you have video then you can actually see whats going on with your server. If the LAN Port Failed then you can purchase a USB-LAN Adapter install it and get your server back online.

Purchasing a used server may or may not be the right approach since you risk purchasing something with an unknown history that may or may not work. You could opt to purchase new HP Data Vault x310 and simply perform a server recovery and get back into action. Here is a link to an offer Alex recently posted which may or may not be still valid but the X310's are I believe still in stock.

viewtopic.php?f=29&t=11218

The most cost effective approach would be to purchase the Debug Cable and then go from there as mentioned above. For more information on a Debug Cable check out the link below:

viewtopic.php?t=8066

The Gen 3 Debug Cable can also be used in other HP Servers so if you end up say purchasing an X310 you should be able to install it in that unit as well which means your purchase was not wasted funds.

Regardless of what you chose to do I would look closely at the connectivity issue to see whats going on there and see what if anything you can do to resolve it and much has been written on the site by myself and others on how to troubleshoot connectivity issues with HP MediaSmart Servers.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Were you able to figure this out? I am in the same situation. The dat files and config files are are there.... how do I extract the data from these?

There are plenty of incrementing file about 4GB each....

See this topic: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11525

_________________
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? If so, be sure to Rate them at WeGotServed.