The other day I had an issue come up with a customer where VSS (Versative Storage Server) integrated file system backups stopped working for some unknown reason. Usually, a reboot fixes these types of issues, but backups continued to fail after a reboot. I started a support call with the backup vendor and after seeing the error logs, the support tech seemed fairly sure he knew what the problem was. This error is usually caused by a malformed path within the registry. So he had me run the following commands on the server and send him the output. Read More...

When setting up VaultLogix online backup, make sure the server is not configured to apply Windows Automatic Update and reboot during the backup window. The problem that occurs is Windows Automatic Update reboots the server in the middle of a backup, VSS shuts down, but can allowed enough time to commit a partial backup which can leave off drives that need backed up. On the next backup, the agent will think there is new data and commenced to reseed those drives on the subsequent backup. Which can cause a problem, if the network has a slow connection that had to be seeded with a mobile vault, because backups will never be able to catch up.

If this occurs you must stop the re-seeding, purge all of the impartial backups since the error occurred. Then resynchronize the Vault Logix DTA file. Then the agent will not try to reseed data that is already backed up and just do the deltas for the selected drives.

FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) is a free Firefox backup utility that functions as an add-on.  You can have it do scheduled backups, backup your whole profile or pieces and parts (including other add-ons, cookies, etc.).

This is most helpful for me since I use NoScript to limit which scripts are allowed to run as well as Permit Cookie to determine which site cookies I want to retain after I close Firefox.  Whenever I rebuild a laptop, it's handy to not have to manually install all add-ons, etc. Read More...

The CommVault Exchange Mailbox iData agents do not backup mailboxes associated with disabled Windows user accounts. The backup job reports a "success" for the job, but when the details of the backup are explored, the backup set does not contain any data. Additionally, requesting a listing of all failed objects for the backup job results in a "no failures" status. According to CommVault, this behavior is by design as is the "successful" backup status. After all, the job did not technically fail if it is not designed to include mailboxes belonging to disabled user accounts. This is very strange given that, in general, CommVault iData agents have an "inclusive by default" behavior.  This can become a real problem if you try to restore data for a former employee whose Windows user account was disabled when they left the company.  The lesson here is that you should always test your backups. Even if the backup report and all job status notifications indicate you are good....test anyway.

I installed Exchange 2010 on a new Windows 2008 R2 server for a customer. I was attempting to do a test move on a mailbox from the old Exchange 2003 server and it failed. I found that the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service was stopped and it would not start. I did some online research and was unable to find a solution.  After further investigation it was discovered that the VaultLogix Classic Agent used for the online backup was using the same port as the Mailbox Replication service. I spoke to a VaultLogix support technician who showed me a registry key that would change the default port from 808 for the agent.

I change “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EVault\InfoStage\Agent\AgentPortNumber” to port 807 and was then able to start the Mailbox Replication service. Read More...

I was setting up Backup Exec 12.5 to function as a VCB proxy to back up our VMs at a VMDK level and ran into a few problems. Version 12.5 has this functionality built in so it was fairly simple to back up a VM from the SAN to the VCB proxy. Restoring it back to the vCenter cluster, on the other hand, was a different story. The first problem I ran into was in running a simple restore. The job would fail as it would try and convert the machine. Simple fix: Install VMWare Converter Standalone on the proxy. Read More...

We had an issue last week where backups of an Exchange 2007 server began to fail after we removed the EMC Replication Manager & EMC Solutions Enabler apps. The errors that we began to see in the Application log like this:

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: A critical component required by the Volume Shadow Copy service is not registered.  This might happened if an error occurred during Windows setup or during installation of a Shadow Copy provider.  The error returned from CoCreateInstance on class with CLSID {bd902507-4491-4001-acdd-a540a2cad34b} and Name HWPRV is [0x80040154].

I went through the process described here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940032  to reregister all the VSS stuff, but it didn’t work. After digging into the VSS CLI, I was seeing the following returned from issuing a “vssadmin list providers” Read More...

I recently ran into a problem trying to restore a SQL Server 2005 database to a Windows XP machine.  The database back up was created on a Windows Vista machine and I thought that the different OS versions was the culprit.  However, it turned out to be related to SQL server instances and folder paths.  Here is full error I received when I attempted to restore the database using SQL Server Management Studio:

Restore failed for Server 'localhost\sqlexpress'.  (Microsoft.SqlServer.Express.Smo)

Additional information:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError: The operating system returned the error '5(Access is denied.)' while attempting 'RestoreContainer::ValidateTargetForCreation' on 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\[my database name].mdf'. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Express.Smo)

I searched the Internet using the error message and found several posts stating that it was a problem with the privileges of the user account that my SQL Server Express service was running as. I hadn't changed the account it was running as and I had restored other databases in the past, but I checked the SQL Server Configuration Manager anyway.  As I suspected the service was still running as the default account (Network Service), so that wasn't it.   Read More...

We recently ran into a problem where one of our customer's servers was randomly rebooting. It looked like the cause of this was the updates from Backup exec that were being downloaded and installed. We checked backup exec and it was not set to install updates at all. After some research we found that they updates were being installed even though it wasn't set to do so. Read More...

My external hard drive that I back up my home computer to crashed the other day. My replacement options included buying another external HDD @ $200+ or find another way to back up my data. I have too much data to backup to DVD. There is always the SOHO RAID solutions but those are $500+. What I wanted was the “no crash, no maintenance” backup solution. Read More...

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.