Strange problem backing up to network drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter dg
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dg

I setup a new server in an office. It is a very loud server tucked away in
a sound resistant cabinet. To allow easy backup media swaps, I setup the
backup so that it backs up to a removable IDE drive in the secretary's
workstation. She swaps the drive out every morning.The server runs Server
2003, the workstation runs w2k. This setup ran fine for weeks.

The drive is shared as "BACKUP" and I have the NTBACKUP on the server backup
nightly to the drive. The strange thing is, lately the backup has not been
going and the log says something like "specified media not available". When
I run the backup job manually, I have no problem and the media is always
found. It is very odd, the backup used to go every night no problem and
this issue only started recently. The backup is actually run by a batch
file with the detailed NTBACKUP command line, I use Task Scheduler to
schedule the batch file to run. To manually backup, I just double click the
batch file so it should be exactly the same as if task scheduler runs it.

I have a few ideas, like maybe the workstation is powering off the network
card to save power? I can't find power settings in w2k for this card, so
maybe that isn't it. Anyway, before I really tackle this one I thought I
would see if anybody had any ideas or suggestions on improving my setup.
ANY TIPS APPRECIATED!

Thanks,
--Dan
 
I setup a new server in an office. It is a very loud server tucked away in
a sound resistant cabinet. To allow easy backup media swaps, I setup the
backup so that it backs up to a removable IDE drive in the secretary's
workstation. She swaps the drive out every morning.The server runs Server
2003, the workstation runs w2k. This setup ran fine for weeks.

The drive is shared as "BACKUP" and I have the NTBACKUP on the server backup
nightly to the drive. The strange thing is, lately the backup has not been
going and the log says something like "specified media not available". When
I run the backup job manually, I have no problem and the media is always
found. It is very odd, the backup used to go every night no problem and
this issue only started recently. The backup is actually run by a batch
file with the detailed NTBACKUP command line, I use Task Scheduler to
schedule the batch file to run. To manually backup, I just double click the
batch file so it should be exactly the same as if task scheduler runs it.

I have a few ideas, like maybe the workstation is powering off the network
card to save power? I can't find power settings in w2k for this card, so
maybe that isn't it. Anyway, before I really tackle this one I thought I
would see if anybody had any ideas or suggestions on improving my setup.
ANY TIPS APPRECIATED!
Click to expand...

I do the same batch file thing and it works for me. However I write
the backup to the local disk, turn off the archive attribute (so it
won't get backed up) and then copy it to the backup disk.

Put some diagnostic commands in the batch file - for example, copy a
file from the server to the backup disk. If the copy command works you
know the batch file is running and the network works. You can
undoubtedly come up with other diagnostic commands to chase this down.



--

Map Of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:
http://www.freewebs.com/vrwc/

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of
arriving safely in one pretty and well-preserved piece.
One should rather skid in broadside, thoroughly used up,
totally worn out, loudly proclaiming "WOW! WHAT A RIDE!"
 
ANY TIPS APPRECIATED!
Click to expand...

At first glance the following might not look like the same problem but it
illustrates that the use of "shared folders" might be the cause of the
problem.

I had a similar trouble to you backing up to a shared folder over my LAN but
I was using Drive Image. The system logs said I was getting Delayed Write
Failures but tests revealed that the cause seemed to be the structure of the
shared folders I was using.

This is tricky to explain but here goes...

The problem seemed to occur because shared folders can cause excess network
traffic. I read somewhere that every time the content of a shared folder is
changed messages are sent to all computers/accounts that have access to the
share (eg every time Drive Image appends a byte or two of data to the backup
multiple messages are sent out and this slows down the LAN to the point that
a "write buffer" gets overwritten).

The fix for me was to restructure the folders that I was using to hold
backups and "push the share down a level"....

Before...

I shared a folder called "Backups" on PC1 and arranged for PC1 to write to
subfolder "Backups\PC1" and PC2 to write to Backups\PC2 etc.

After...

I removed the share from "Backups" and shared Backups\PC2 only. (Backups\PC1
does not need to be shared).

This seems to have cured the problem for me. I haven't had a backup failure
for 6 months now.

Colin
 
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