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Hi everyone,
I'm using Windows Server Backup on a Windows Server 2012 R2 system that has been in production for half a year or so. The server has around 60GB used, and the backup drive is a 160GB external drive that I had sitting around and put it in place until they can afford a larger external drive. The setup has been working great, and just yesterday when I opened the Windows Server Backup utility, I noticed that all backups have been successful and there were well over 100 backups available. The external hard drive was showing "in the red" for space available, about 15GB free or so if I remember right. But that's fine, since I understand that Windows Server Backup should delete the oldest backup available.
...OR...you know, it deletes everything. So I log in today, and what do you know? 60ish GB used on the external drive, so plenty of free space. But only 1 copy available. Is...like...am I missing something? Is that how it's supposed to work when the drive gets full? I was under the impression it would delete files from the oldest snapshot and create a new backup. Or delete several old snapshots.
Did something happen in a recent Windows update? Any way to fix it? In my little bit of searching before this, I found that some others have had experiences with at least Server 2008 where Windows Server Backup would all the sudden only keep 1 copy. So I guess I'll know tomorrow whether or not that's happening to me; whether I see "1 copy available" again, or "2 copies available".
Thanks in advance for any advice!
- Edited by link470 Thursday, November 27, 2014 6:25 PM
Sunday, November 16, 2014 10:50 PM
Answers
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Hi,
The backup type is changed to Full from incremental automatically?
I checked, and it hadn't done that. The backup was still set to Normal [Full].
And if it is caused by a corrupted hard disk, you can try to do a check disk on it first and you may need to get a disk analysis tool from the hard disk manufacturer for accurate testing.
This is what I'm thinking is the most likely cause. I ended up stopping the backup schedule for the drive that was getting I/O errors in Event Viewer and releasing the old backup drive and pulling it. Then I added a new external backup drive and created a new nightly schedule, and that's working great. The backup completes very quickly and is a full backup every time, using VSS for block backups so the disk space isn't all eaten up [how it always was before this incident], and the drive is now carrying multiple backups again.
Something just got very confused when the last backup drive had I/O errors.
The other thing I thought was interesting this time around is that I could no longer select VSS Copy Backup. Only VSS Full backup was selected and I couldn't find an option anywhere to change it to VSS Copy Backup. I'm assuming either VSS Copy was removed in 2012 R2 but not in 2012, or my backup settings I chose didn't allow for that option to be shown during the wizard. Does anyone have any insight on this?
Note: VSS Full is fine, and is working great. But just curious, since one 2012 server I operate is set to VSS Copy, and the other is set to VSS Full. Both appear to work the same and I understand how it really only effects the archive bit being set, but just curious why VSS Copy didn't present itself as an option. I've also recently updated the third large 700ish MB update for Server 2012 R2/Windows 8.1, so maybe that changed something.
Either way, resolved! Backup appears to be fine. But what I'm still really curious of is what caused the backup to start only holding 1 copy.
Thursday, November 27, 2014 6:06 PM
All replies
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Hi,
As it has been a while, whether new backup copies are created these days?
As you said Windows Server Backup should not delete all backup at a time even it is for releasing disk space - it will not delete more than 1/8 space and if it has to, it will provide an error "no enough space" instead of just deleting all backups.
Since you mentioned Windows Update, have you checked if any new update is installed just before the issue occurs?
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Thursday, November 20, 2014 5:54 AM
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Hi,
As it has been a while, whether new backup copies are created these days?
I've been monitoring the server in question, and the backups are still only maintaining 1 copy. I did notice though that the "Advanced option:" in Windows Server Backup schedule settings shows up as "VSS Full Backup", instead of "VSS Copy Backup" which other Windows Server 2012 servers [not R2] are using. VSS Full seems to only store 1 copy, and the backups take an incredibly long time to run. What used to take 1 hour now takes more like 18 hours.
As you said Windows Server Backup should not delete all backup at a time even it is for releasing disk space - it will not delete more than 1/8 space and if it has to, it will provide an error "no enough space" instead of just deleting all backups.
That's what I thought, glad to know that isn't the usual behavior I'm experiencing. I did have a look in the event viewer as well and noticed that there was I/O errors on the external drive. So I'm wondering if that's contributing to why the backup is running so incredibly slow, and also what may have caused Windows Server Backup to delete all the previous backups.
Since you mentioned Windows Update, have you checked if any new update is installed just before the issue occurs?
No new updates were installed before. The last updates would have been the October patch Tuesday, where all updates were successfully installed. Windows Server Backup was fine after that until right up before I ran these past updates in November. So I can't see that directly being the cause, at least not immediately taking effect.
My bets right now are with the external hard drive possibly failing.
Thursday, November 20, 2014 10:34 PM
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Hi,
The backup type is changed to Full from incremental automatically?
Full Backup will take a long time - actually the first backup of an incremental backup schedule is a full backup which will also take a long time. The rest ones will be incremental so they will be finished much quicker.
In this situation can you change the backup type to incremental again?
And if it is caused by a corrupted hard disk, you can try to do a check disk on it first and you may need to get a disk analysis tool from the hard disk manufacturer for accurate testing.
If you have any feedback on our support, please send to 该邮件地址已受到反垃圾邮件插件保护。要显示它需要在浏览器中启用 JavaScript。.
Thursday, November 27, 2014 6:19 AM
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Hi,
The backup type is changed to Full from incremental automatically?
I checked, and it hadn't done that. The backup was still set to Normal [Full].
And if it is caused by a corrupted hard disk, you can try to do a check disk on it first and you may need to get a disk analysis tool from the hard disk manufacturer for accurate testing.
This is what I'm thinking is the most likely cause. I ended up stopping the backup schedule for the drive that was getting I/O errors in Event Viewer and releasing the old backup drive and pulling it. Then I added a new external backup drive and created a new nightly schedule, and that's working great. The backup completes very quickly and is a full backup every time, using VSS for block backups so the disk space isn't all eaten up [how it always was before this incident], and the drive is now carrying multiple backups again.
Something just got very confused when the last backup drive had I/O errors.
The other thing I thought was interesting this time around is that I could no longer select VSS Copy Backup. Only VSS Full backup was selected and I couldn't find an option anywhere to change it to VSS Copy Backup. I'm assuming either VSS Copy was removed in 2012 R2 but not in 2012, or my backup settings I chose didn't allow for that option to be shown during the wizard. Does anyone have any insight on this?
Note: VSS Full is fine, and is working great. But just curious, since one 2012 server I operate is set to VSS Copy, and the other is set to VSS Full. Both appear to work the same and I understand how it really only effects the archive bit being set, but just curious why VSS Copy didn't present itself as an option. I've also recently updated the third large 700ish MB update for Server 2012 R2/Windows 8.1, so maybe that changed something.
Either way, resolved! Backup appears to be fine. But what I'm still really curious of is what caused the backup to start only holding 1 copy.
Thursday, November 27, 2014 6:06 PM
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Hello,
it took us a few weeks and lots of trial and error to figure this out.
Despite backing up every day successfully only the previous day was restorable on one of our servers (2012) and the windows server backup GUI showed only 1 copy on the ISCSI drive. Recreating the backup from scratch (and prior deleting all shadow copies) did not help.
It turned out the assigned space for the volume shadow service for the specific drive (drive properties) was set way too low. After increasing that amount the backup has created several copies and we could now restore more than just a single day.
Best regards,
complingua- Edited by complingua Thursday, April 13, 2017 10:43 AM
Thursday, April 13, 2017 9:58 AM
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Similar issue here.
A disk error caused the back up to fail several times. Solved the disk error issue, but was only getting 1 copy available (yesterdays).
Turns out the Advanced back up settings had been changed from VSS Copy to Full. Restored this to VSS copy and we had the multiday copies available after that.
rossh
Saturday, May 06, 2017 5:57 AM
