I recently found myself in a situation where some pictures, that to me were priceless, had been deleted from my camera memory card. Unfortunately those pictures had not been moved or copied to any other media. Like most of us I wanted a free method of recovering them. I found a software called Recuva, which is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! Read More...

We have been having trouble with a SCSI card that was attached to a tape drive that was installed on a CommVault Media Agent server. The card was brand new and the drivers were Windows 2k3 certified. We started having issues with this server during the CommVault install. The server would just spontaneously reboot leaving the CommVault backups in disarray. Troubleshooting led us to update the firmware on the card, the tape library firmware & driver, and the tape drive firmware & driver. This fixed the problem for a few days and it would happen again. It would only happen when doing an auxiliary copy from disk to tape. After some deep-dive troubleshooting on the SCSI I/O bus, we were able to get some logs during the time immediately before one of the spontaneous reboots/failures. From the logs we were able to find that the card actually had some type of problem that caused extended I/O latencies during periods of high traffic (aux copies). We ordered an Adaptec card and installed it. Now, not only are copies to tape 2x faster, it hasn’t crashed . . . yet.

The Symantec Mail Security Appliance software uses passive mode for ftp when backing up the configuration. Since this device is usually installed in the DMZ, an ISA server publishing rule needs to be created to publish your internal ftp server.  This rule needs to be edited to support passive mode with a port range to be used. Read More...

When using the Advanced Open File Option with Backup Exec, make sure you check the Job Log to see if it is actually getting used correctly. I wanted to use it to back up VMWare Server virtual machines at CITBA. The job was running successfully, so I thought it was working correctly. We started getting calls that VMs running on that server could not be reached by users trying to RDP to them. Once the OSE connected to them via the VMWare Server console, the app would show an "access denied" error (only once) and then go away and stuff would start working. Read More...

If you want to restore a SBS 2003 box that was upgraded from SBS 2000 using tape backups from Backup Exec, here is the process…and believe me this is abbreviated. Read More...

In a Backup Exec selection list, wildcard directories can be used.  For example: C:\Program Files\Symantec\SMSMSE\4.6\Server\bm_ruleset*.  Another example that needs to be excluded is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\*.config.cch.* according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815168.  This is if the .NET Framework v1.1 is installed.

When working with HP Ultrium tape drives, it is sometimes a challenge to get them to run at speeds even close to the advertised maximum. Sometimes there are questions as to how to troubleshoot and how know you are getting the most out of the drive. Here are some tips: Read More...

We used to run bemcmd91.exe with a long list of parameters to export and import Backup Exec jobs and settings.  With version 10, there is now a gui, BEUtility.exe. Read http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/274778.htm.  This document says "BEUtility will not copy media sets that are not currently assigned to a job". I assumed this means that it will copy media sets that were assigned to a job, but it does not. It also says it will copy the alert configuration, but it does not. You need to go through all the settings and check them.

When using Backup Exec 10.x, you may experience problems backing up SQL Server 2000 or MSDE databases if the file path contains double backslashes in the file path.

The error within Backup Exec is:  Read More...

The recovery partition on ThinkPads installs in two different sizes depending on how you install it.  If you revert to factory settings, the recovery partition should be 4-5 GB.  If you restore the system from a Rescue and Recovery backup, the recovery partition will only be about 500MB.  The down side is that Rescue and Recovery installs/upgrades write files to the recovery partition.  The 500MB partition fills up very quickly and prevents you from upgrading/installing Rescue and Recovery.  Your two options at that point are 1) research Rescue and Recovery to see if there is an install parameters that prevents files from being written to the recovery partition (in the interest of time, I have not done this), or 2) remove the recovery partition and then install Rescue and Recovery.