KWSupport : Backups

WHS - Now ready for Business PrimeTime?

kwsupport — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:12:00 GMT

One of the knocks on Windows Home Server (WHS) is that it contains the word 'Home' in its name. If that issue has kept you from selling or installing WHS in businesses, then check out the news from HP -- they have released WHS with a new name: HP StorageWorks X500 Data Vault!

The equipment is almost identical to their HP MediaSmart Server models, except with a faster processor, and SKU's with larger (1TB and 1.5TB drives) in them.

I install WHS in all my business client offices -- even those with SBS servers. Are you?

WHS & SBS: Approved for Backups

kwsupport — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:54:00 GMT

For more than a year I have been promoting the use of Windows Home Server as a local backup solution in a Small Business Server (SBS2003/SBS2008) environment (per these two blogs: blog1 , blog2). I already have WHS installed at most of my SBS customer sites.

It now seems as if Microsoft is now willing to say "Yes" -- that using WHS to backup your workstations and servers is a viable and supported scenario! Read more on Microsoft's Technet site.

WHS Business Opportunities

kwsupport — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:56:00 GMT

If you are a Microsoft Partner, there will be a 5W/50 webinar entitled “Business Opportunities with Windows Home Server – Updated with PowerPack 2 Content” today at noon (EDT) given by Grey Lancaster and Kevin Royalty. If you think WHS is only for homes, then you're still thinking within the box! WHS is a perfect fit with SBS 2003/2008.

WHS and the Acer Aspire easyStore H340

kwsupport — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:42:00 GMT

Talk about a deal too good to refuse! Acer recently came out with their WHS server, that competes straight up with the HP MediaSmart Server. For the rest of this post, I will refer to it as the 'easyStore'. A week ago I stumbled on a deal through NCIX (USA) that was offering the easyStore for $399, with a 1TB drive and 2GB memory, and for a limited time was throwing in a second 1TB drive. I jumped at the chance. And it arrived by FedEx this afternoon.

Within 30 minutes I had it unboxed, powered up, installed the WHS connector to my Win7 laptop and now running a full backup. A few random thoughts:

It comes with a real honest-to-goodness printed manual (in 6 languages)!
Astethics of the external box is very nice. Black color, USB port in front, 4 more in the back along with an Ethernet port
System started up and was up and running without a hitch or issue. I like that!
WHS PowerPack 1 is already installed on it. Be sure to get Power Pack 2 installed on it!

What's new or different with the easyStore versus HP?

The easyStore comes with an IP Configuration tool to adjust the server's IP settings. Since this works from the rmeote WHS console, you no longer need to access the server via Remote Desktop to make such changes.
Acer has implemented a one-touch USB backup. What you may say? Simply put, plug in a USB drive that contains various media files and press the USB button. The easyStore will automatically copy all the files on that USB drive to the Public shared folder on the server, and automatically place each file in it's appropriate sub folder (Music, Photo, Video)! How cool is that. You no longer have to logon to the WHS console in order to access the USB drive and copy files.
The easyStore comes with a 6 month subscription to McAfee's Total Protection software pre-installed
The easyStore also comes with the WHS Lights Out addon that allow you to suspend or wake up the server at specific times, such as when its time to backup workstations.
The easyStore also comes with Digital Media Server (DMS) and an iTunes Server.

For a more in-depth review, along with pscreenshots, check out Andrew Edney's blog post on the Acer easyStore.

Once my first backup is completed, I'll test adding the second drive to this server and report on my findings!

WHS and Power Pack 2

kwsupport — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:25:00 GMT

Microsoft released Power Pack 2 for Windows Home Server today (KB 956587). This is a free update that offers several new features. It does require you to already have Power Pack 1 installed.

SBS, WHS and Backup Software

kwsupport — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:32:00 GMT

One of my mottos has always been: "You cannot have enough backup!". So, I am always investigating and testing backup software. When Microsoft first releasd Windows Home Server (WHS), I knew that this was a product I would be testing. Well, tonight, it saved my bacon!

My own SBS 2003 server that has been running for years experienced a serious hard drive failure. Fortunately I do use Raid-5 disk configuration. So I shut down the server, replaced the drive, fired up the server to rebuild the Raid, and then rebooted. But apparently something else was amiss, as Windows would not boot up properly, reporting a failure or corruption with Active Directory. After trying a couple of other options unsuccessfully, I decided to see if WHS would get me back online.

Yes, I use WHS as my backup software of choice for backing up my SBS 2003 server! (P.S. The WHS Team has an informative article here).

So, I pulled out my WHS Restore CD and booted my server off the CD. However, it did not load a driver for my NIC card. No problem, as I knew the drill: go to another workstation, fire up the WHS Console, view the backup directory for the computer in question (my SBS server), and copy the contents of the WHS Drivers for Recovery folder to a USB thumb drive, and rename the folder to DRIVERS. I then took the thumb drive back to the server, where the WHS restore screen has a convenient button to install additional drivers. An hour later my server was back online and operational!

Lessons learned? There are lots of vendors offering backup software solutions for the Windows marketplace. I have used Acronis, ShadowProtect, and others. These are all good products. But WHS is a real winner for me, and for many of my small business customers. I have WHS installed and backing up both SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 servers, plus serveral peer-to-peer networks. It just works! It has even recovered a Windows 7 Beta laptop for me!

Now, someone may say that offsite (or remote online) backups are required, and I would not argue that point at all. Remember: I believe in multiple levels of backup solutions. But for the small business and home environments, WHS is an excellent backup software solution.

Cheers!

WHS Restore CD and Realtek NIC

kwsupport — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:05:00 GMT

I've been testing out the Windows 7 beta on one of my laptops this week. And following my own best practices, I made sure I installed the WHS connector on it and made several backups during my testing. So, yesterday I tried (unsuccessfully) to join the Win7 laptop to a SBS2008 domain. (Yes, I'm aware of my changes required on SBS 2008 to allow Windows 7 to join the domain via http://connect). But still, it failed.

So, when I got home I wanted to restore my laptop to its state before my attempt to join it to a domain. Talk about wasting valuable time!

First, I couldn't find my Restore CD. So, I downloaded the WHS Restore CD (PPK1 version) from Microsoft's web site. But, in trying to burn the ISO image, I encountered two bad CD's in a row. Fortunately, the third CD worked. Once I got the CD created, I booted my laptop from it only to find that it could not find my WHS server. Think, Kevin ... I told myself ... it has to be an issue with the NIC driver. Sure enough, a quick Google (errr, Live Search), and I found instructions on how to grab the drivers from the WHS Backup directory, put them onto a USB stick, and then at the appropriate time request the WHS Restore CD to scan for additional drivers.

No good. Still could not see the server. More searches and I discover that other people had encountered the same issue. Common denominator? A Realtek NIC was involved! I went to the Realtek support site, and download the drivers, and put them onto the USB stick. Still no good! More searches all indicated that grabbing the drivers from the Realtek web site should do the trick. So I went back one more time, and for some reason, the files I download this time from the Realtek site were different than the drivers I had downloaded 20 minutes before. (I later discovered that my original search for Realtek drivers had taken me to an outdated web page on their support site).

I dumped the drivers onto the USB stick and voila! --- the WHS Restore CD found my server, and six minutes later I had my laptop restored.

Hope this helps!

-kw

Experience with the Seagate disk drive fiasco

kwsupport — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:54:00 GMT

As most of you know, last week there were widespread reports of Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200.11 drives failing. Initially only the 1TB disk drives were thought to be the issie. But later it was determined that the problem also existed in some of their other 7200.11 drives.

I know, as I got hit with an SBS 2008 server that had four 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives!

Seagate has since come out with a free firmware upgrade and utility. The download is in an ISO format as you must create a bootable CD to run it. However, please note that this firmware utility will not run on systems utilizing SATA Raid controllers. Instead you will need to remove the drives from your server and connect them one at a time to a desktop station that is running a standard SATA drive controller.

To determine if your drive is amongst those with the bad firmware, and download the appropriate firmware, click here.

Good luck!

Backup fails after bare-metal restore (SBS 2008)

kwsupport — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:44:00 GMT

I had a situation today where I had to reformat & reconfigure the raid drives for an SBS 2008 server. That part went fine, and doing a bare-metal restore of the server from the scheduled SBS 2008 daily USB backup went flawlessly. After we brought the server back online, I attempted to do a new full backup, but the backup failed with the following error: Creation of the shared protection point timed out. Unknown error (0x81000101)

A quick Internet search found KB 956136 ("If calls to VSS management interface API's are made..."). Now, the title of this KB article may not sound like it is applicable to any problems with performing a backup. But the details of the article includes this statement:

For example, assume that you perform a Bare Metal Restore (BMR) for a Windows Small Business Server (Windows SBS) 2008-based system. Then, you use Windows Server Backup (WSB) to perform a backup operation after the BMR operation. In this situation, the first attempt fails and generates the following error message: Creation of the shared protection point timed out. Unknown error (0x81000101)

Sounds like my situation! And sure enough, running the backup later in the day worked perfectly. Hope this helps someone!

SBS 2008 and Sharepoint Log file

kwsupport — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:04:00 GMT

If using SBS 2008, one of the things you want to do is to install and run the SBS 2008 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) on a regular basis. At my first SBS 2008 installation, BPA recenlty reported that my Sharepoint log file was larger than 1gb in size. Strange, I thought, since this customer had not even started using sharepoint. Beyond that, BPA did not offer any suggestions for resolving this issue.

So, here are the instructions (from the SBS BPA team) on what to do:

Step 1: start up command prompt in administrator mode. You do this by clicking on Start, then right clicking on Command Prompt, then clicking 'run as Administrator'

Step 2: From the command prompt:
1. Type: sqlcmd –E –S \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query and press Enter
2. From the 1> prompt, type: select name from sys.databases and press Enter
3. From the 2> prompt, type: go and press Enter
This will display a list of all databases know to SQL server. One of them will look something like this:
SharePoint_Config_29c26fca….

Step 3: Now, with the actual name of the Sharepoint database, you will want to enter the following commands, replacing dbname with the actual name of the Sharepoint database. Be sure to leave the brackets [ ], parens ( ), and _log, as noted:

1> BACKUP LOG [dbname] WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
2> Go
1> Use [dbname]
2> Go
1> DBCC SHRINKFILE([dbname_log],2)
2> Go
1> Exit

For example, if your Sharepoint database was named SharePoint_Config_12345, then you would type in:

1> BACKUP LOG [SharePoint_Config_12345] WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
2> Go
1> Use [SharePoint_Config_12345]
2> Go
1> DBCC SHRINKFILE([SharePoint_Config_12345_log],2)
2> Go
1> Exit

Hope this helps!

USB Drives and Slow Server

kwsupport — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:19:00 GMT

I know that there are plenty of posts that deal with issues related to external USB drives on servers, such as problems when rebooting the server, or the server acting strange when a USB drive is not removed properly. But until today, I had not encountered any of these scenarios.

Situation was that the server was slow to log on, and clicking on 'My Computer' took several minutes before it would display the full list of server drives. My first attempt to resolve the issue was to uninstall the A/V, but that did nothing. I then tried rebooting the server, but to no avail.

Finally, I noticed that there should have been two external USB hard drives attached that the customer uses for rotating real time backups. These were assigned as drives L: and M:, but M: did not show any drive attached. So, I clicked on the handy-dandy green check icon to safely remove the missing USB driver, and voila!, everything started working.

Hope this helps someone down the road!

-kw

Free File Sync Utilities

kwsupport — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:29:00 GMT

In my never ending quest to find low-cost (OK ... free) utilities, I recently needed to find a file-syncing utility for several small clients. Specifically we were looking for a utility to sync one or more folders from a computer to an external USB hard drive. Suprisingly, Microsoft had three of the four utilities I tested. Each utility has there merits and places. Perhaps on a future post I will list the Pros and Cons of each.

Robocopy - Microsoft's long time command line utility since the NT days
FolderShare - Microsoft's very network-friendly utility to sync files & folders
SyncToy - Microsoft's latest sync utility for XP and Vista
Allway Sync - A highly recommended third party sync utility, with both free and paid versions

RoboCopy

Those who have used this utility in the past know that this is an invaluable tool in the IT/Tech toolbox. It simply works and works well. The current version is part of Microsoft's 2003 Resource Kit Tools. Don't be fooled ... although it says 2003, these tools work equally will on XP and Vista (but NOT support 645 bit OS). There is also a Robocopy GUI add-on, but I have not used it.

FolderShare

When I first heard about FolderShare from a Microsoft employee. I could not believe that Microsoft had been keeping this utility a secret. Not only does it allow you to keep files synced betweek your devices, you can also share files with friends and remotely download files from any web browser. And did I say that it's free? Consider it a poor man's Groove or Sharepoint.

Sync Toy

The third free utility from Microsoft is SyncToy (version 1.4). There's also SyncToy 2.0 Beta available that's 64-bit compatible. It's labeled beta, but has been tested even more than the 1.4 version. I was very impressed with how easy this was to set up and use.

Allway Sync

The last utility I looked at, Allway Sync is a product of USOV Lab in Virginia, and is the only non-Microsoft free solution. They offer both a free version for private use, and an inexpensive ($19.95) pro version for commercial and business purposes. You not only can sink to other computers or USB devices, but for they also have a portable U3 version as well.

PST on a Network Folder - Not!

kwsupport — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 02:58:00 GMT

We've had some recent posts in one of the SBS listserves asking how to manage Outlook archived PST files for users, and it was asked if the PST files could be stored on the server. Microsoft's KB 297019 specifically says that .pst, .ost, and ...(read more)

Modifying SBS Backup

kwsupport — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:55:00 GMT

There's always a fine line between tweaking to make something work, and tweaking just because you can. I'm not sure what camp this post belongs in. BKRunner.exe is the SBS program that wraps around the NTBackup utility. BKRunner generates the...(read more)

USB Drive on Server May Affect Rebooting

kwsupport — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:23:00 GMT

More and more people are hooking up USB hard drives to their servers to do daily or image backups. A word of caution: if you find that your server will not reboot, it may be due to your USB drive getting in the way. Unplug your USB drive and if the server...(read more)

Quicken and Vista

kwsupport — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 02:47:00 GMT

I struggled for quite a bit this evening trying to transfer my Quicken 2007 over to my Vista workstation and get it up and running. I encountered two issues that several other people have also encountered, but the solutions were not always exact or correct...(read more)

Thank God for Image Backups!

kwsupport — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:44:00 GMT

Two years ago I decided to invest in some USB external hard drives and appropriate software, and then on a routine basis, go around and make a full image backup of each workstation and laptop in the office. [Routine defined as "whenvever I have a...(read more)

Ejecting backup tape

kwsupport — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:05:00 GMT

One of the common questions we get in the SBS newsgroups is: “I'm using the SBS Tape Backup Wizard. How can I have it eject the tape when it is finished?”

The answer is that the SBS Tape Wizard does not provide an option to have the tape eject. You can, however, do this manually, by creating a batch file and scheduling it to run after your tape backup process should have completed. So, on my work server, my tape backup starts at 7:30pm, and iti finished around 11:30pm. I schedule my “eject” script to run at 5am in the morning.

You will need to modify the eject script below to identify your tape device, which you can find by opening up your SBS2003 Server Mgmt Console, and going to the Remote Storage Manager section.

Tape Eject script:

REM: This script will eject the backup tape
echo off
rsm.exe eject /LF"ARCHIVE Python 06408-XXX SCSI Sequential Device" /astart
exit

UPS Recommendations

kwsupport — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:43:00 GMT

Some folks in the SmallBiz community were asking about recommendations on UPS's. Here was the original post:

Since UPSes were mentioned recently, I was wondering what you all are recommending for your clients with a lower-end server. At the high end we have APC SmartUPS. Are there others that do about the same thing but are cheaper? Other brands? What about using the APC BackUPS BX 1500 VA or similar? What do you lose by not using the SmartUPS? I would like to find a cost-effective solution but I don't want to skimp where skimping should not be done!

I summarized some of their responses below. Hope this helps!

For the most part, if my company implements a server, non-rack mount case, we sell them a smart ups 750 by APC, if they are plugging multiple items in to it, we go the 1500 route, both are set at a reasonable price point.

The APC Smart UPS series are speced as generator capable. It provides line interactive power capability to clean the dirty power the 5-15 k generators Provide. The lower priced APC UPSes are not generator rated. I find the competitors usually do not show any generator specs. If you do find other UPSes that are generator rated for less than one thousand US dollars, please let me know.

I have to agree with the others, APC is about the only way to go. I've had clients that insist on saving a few dollars (and on strange stuff too), but I've never backed down on this point and I've never had to say "oops". APC has some lower end models, but the SmartUPS line has never been a problem for me.

APC pretty much rules this market, but TrippLite makes decent products as well as is much less pricey.

One thing that I'd like to add: test the battery regularly. The APC SmartUPS line can be connected to the computer that it is protecting and shut it down in the event of a failure. But the real thing to watch is that the battery is tested (this can be automated in the PowerChute software that comes with the UPS) you don't want to find out the battery is failing when you need it most. Usually a little over 2 years then you have to do something.

I once installed a Belkin UPS for a client and it worked great. The only problem was that after I installed the Belkin equivalent of PowerChute, the server kept shutting down 30 seconds after login. Of course we did not discover this problem until I was off site and I logged into the server remotely. Do you have any idea what it's like to be 10 miles away from your client and to have a message pop up on your screen letting you know that you have 30 seconds until your client gets very, very angry with you? Not fun. It's been APC ever since.

Backup using External Hard Drives

kwsupport — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:56:00 GMT

This is a short compilation of responses from SBS consultants on how they are using external hard drives for SBS backups. Please add your thoughts and experiences

First, read Susan's blogs on: (1) Overview: http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2004/09/29/14590.aspx and (2) Tweaking NTBackup: http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2004/05/12/6318.aspx

Various notes, comments, ideas:

One thing I have noticed - when you set it to back up to a drive, it sets it to keep 2 backup files and if it does that it will probably result in there not being enough space on the Rev - so be sure to select only one file. It will give you an alert, but you can ignore it.

Most of the drives I've seen are formatted FAT32, which has a 4GB file size limit. This means many backups will fail ( since most systems are > 4GB ).Just convert the drive to NTFS and the problem goes away.

For tape-based backups, we generally install an internal HDD as the staging disk. This is where we instruct the backup software to write the backup file. When the backup is completed, we have it run a command to copy the staging disk to an external USB drive. This seems to give better results for us. It reduces the number of caddies necessary.

We purchased a REV Drive and SBS sees it as a CD and therefore the Server will not back up to the drive. Anyone know a work around? The work around is set the backup to save to a fixed disk, find the relevant key in the registry which says e.g F:\ and change it to the drive letter of the REV.

We use SimpleTech external hard drives. We recommend at least two as a minimum. This has more capacity than the Rev Drive and is much cheaper. A 120GB drive retails for about $150.00, the Iomega REV 35GB/90GB** USB 2.0 external drive retails for $399 (prices from April 2005).
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpledrive/simpledrive_external.php

Our customers have between 2 and 5 drives they cycle through, and we set the drives to hold 3 backups before overwriting.

We have been using external USB drives for just over a year now, and recommend them to all of our clients. We haven't had any issues to date - very reliable and easy to use. We always do normal full backups . . . never incremental or differential . . .

I'm using the SBS Backup wizard to do a full backup of the OS & Exchange, so that I get the email reports each morning. But I've separated the data backup, using a program called Second Copy, that does incremental backups of the data. The reason I like that solution is that Second Copy just copies the files, not putting them in a volume that you have to restor from - you just access the data files directly if you need to. You can install Second Copy as a Service so that it runs whether you're logged on or not. It's been very reliable.

I have been trialling Hot Swap IDE RAID1 recently. Details: (1) The array is used solely for the backup, nothing else. I also store the ASR backup on there as well. (2) The reason for RAID1 is that you still have a copy on site as in my experience the vast majority of problems occurred since the last backup (although Previous Version is now mitigating this) and I can find no single drive Hot Swap IDE enclosures here. (3) Speed, speed, speed. (4) Cost is much lower than tape with the high capacity drives available. (5) Media handling and storage is an issue.

I am now considering internal or external RAID1 hot swap PATA/SATA options from Accusys (www.accusys.com.tw) and Accordance Systems (www.accordance.com.tw). With a couple of spare drives this system can cost approx NZ$1.5K. My problem with this system is the sensitivity of the drives to handling and environmental conditions. Also the lack of ability to hold data for long periods (although you could probably buy a new drive and caddy every month for a year to overcome this).