Friday 22 October 2010

ShadowProtect – Garbage In = Garbage Out

The situation we are in is not the fault of ShadowProtect specifically, but one that we have encountered before where the system’s disks were starting to fail and the backup was image based. Thus, any image backup software can be found to have bad data within the image.

image

We are in the process of finalizing an SBS 2008 server setup for a new client on-site. Their “server” system was experiencing spontaneous reboots with Check Disk running on each start up. This morning the system refused to come back up.

We had set up a ShadowProtect backup on that machine to help protect the data that was on it.

However, as the above screenshot of a BeyondCompare data copy out of the mounted ShadowProtect image shows us, if the data going in is bad the data coming out will be bad.

We experienced a situation like this at an unprecedented level a few years ago where a client’s very large RAID 5 array decided to start dropping sectors on the drives. We ended up recovering that SBS domain using the Swing method and the data through a combination of backup recoveries across the two servers at that site.

In this case we have no other fallback methods other than some of the users may have a copy of the corrupted files on the own systems since the central “server” has been behaving quite flaky for a while now.

So, we will be mounting the ShadowProtect backups that have been running on the flaky system for a couple of weeks now to see if we can find any of the now corrupted files that still may be in good shape.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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