Cause for Pause: My SBS Backups Are Gone?!?

We were asked to recover a folder set for a client from the beginning of this year.

When we went to the backup destination media that should have that backup set on it we were greeted with the following shock:

In this particular circumstance the SBS in question was deployed just about a year ago. The backup destination happened to be the first disk in their three drive rotation (we rotate every two weeks and test their backups for this client).

We were fortunate that the folders needed were found on Disk 2 in the rotation. But, anything beyond that would have been useless to us as the files that were changed beyond the Drive 2 date set were still needed.

What does this mean for us?

Well, for starters any client with less than three drives in their rotations will be bumped up to at least 3.

We will be implementing a grandfather clause into the backup structure to allow for one drive to have file and folder access for the last year.

In this particular case we pulled Drive 2 out of the rotation immediately so as to use as an archive just in case.

We will be digging into this server’s logs around the time of the backup drive being blanked to see if there are any indicator log entries that we can use to flag and e-mail us. There may be cases where we would want to pull that drive right out and leave it alone for 6 to 12 months.

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

Windows Server Backup Recovery Fail – A Handle to the driver control device could not be created. . .

We needed to spot recover some files on one of our client’s servers.

But, when we plugged in the required backup USB hard drive and ran the Recovery Wizard from within the Windows Server Backup (WSB) node we ran into a really strange error:

Recovery Wizard

Unable to browse ServerName (C:). A handle to the driver control device could not be created. Make sure the driver is installed correctly.

Now, a search for the error message turned up very little in the way of results.

Somehow, in the numerous searches we attempted on the problem, the following site held the clue:

• Microsoft Forums: Can’t install backup feature on Server 2K8 Standard.

In the above linked forum post SriramB[MSFT] runs the questioner through some steps to get WSB installed. But, the clue for us was found because of the following found in the Device Manager after revealing hidden devices:

We right clicked on the File as Volume Driver and Uninstalled it. We then right clicked on the root computer name and clicked on Scan for hardware changes and the File as Volume Driver got picked up:

File as Volume Driver

Device driver software installed successfully.

Once the driver was installed, we saw this in our Recovery process:

The + NetworkData (L:) volume was able to be browsed for the content we were looking to restore.

We are not entirely sure what caused the driver to get knocked out in the first place since the backup portion of WSB was working just fine.

This is one reason why regular spot recovery as well as a full recovery tests should be a mandatory part of any managed services offering. If the backups are not tested, then no one will know they were broken until there was a real emergency.

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