wbadmin, wireless and failures

tccack wrote:
I have been through several guides posted on the net, and there is the suggestion that you need to do the backup via USB but that defeats the purpose of having the NAS to me. If I need to do this then I could have continued to use an external drive and not bothered with the NAS.

I think you are confusing backing up the NAS with backing up your PC. BTW if you are using your NAS for primary storage (not just backup) you will need a backup strategy.

tccack wrote:
Any ideas on how to get this done?

Switch to wired ethernet. If it completes, then it will be clear that your "solid" wireless connection still glitches sometimes.

I've managed to finally sort out the backup in a certain sense by getting the backup initiated from the NAS to pull from the laptop over wireless.
I've only set it so far to back up the 9gb of data from the d drive which it appears to have done for the most part.
I am getting a few permission errors which I think are the shadow copies or swap files not being backed up.

What is odd, is that when I run it again after it says its finished, the process seems to run a complete backup again instead of the incremental one.

StephenB wrote:

tccack wrote: I have been through several guides posted on the net, and there is the suggestion that you need to do the backup via USB but that defeats the purpose of having the NAS to me. If I need to do this then I could have continued to use an external drive and not bothered with the NAS. I think you are confusing backing up the NAS with backing up your PC. BTW if you are using your NAS for primary storage (not just backup) you will need a backup strategy. tccack wrote: Any ideas on how to get this done? Switch to wired ethernet. If it completes, then it will be clear that your "solid" wireless connection still glitches sometimes.

The NAS is purely for backup at this stage, though I will use it as a DLNA server later too.
I will back up the NAS to a portabe hard drive occasionally also.

I will run a repeat of the backup on D drive via wired connection though in any case to be sure.

What is the process for backup up the laptop to the NAS via USB? If I do this can I then do incremental backups via wireless once the parent batch of data is in place? Would this be mor elikely to succeed.

Still confused about why some of the files fail due to permission issues, when other of the same type, by same author with same attributes copy over perfectly.

My experience has been that backup over wireless is slow and can be unreliable.

If you want a reliable backup - don't use wireless. (Just don't do it!)

The permissions issues will depend on what backup s/w you are using (you did not say); it may also depend on whether or not the backup is being done from a volume snapshot using Windows VSS. In general, you should not see permissions problems.

I'm not using software to back up. Acronis and Windows Complete Backup (using wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\READYNAS\backup -include:c:,d: -allCritical) failed miserably via wired or wireless connection after about 19-25%. I am actually running the backup from the NAS (Frontview) and having it pull a "mirror" of the drives. Not what I am really after to be fair as I want to be able to restore the laptop should it fail (which is why ideally the Windows Complete Backup process is what I want)

What is the windows vss thing?

Pretty much all backup systems have a common problem: file locking. When a file is open in an application it gets locked, and this means some other application can't open it to read it. In order to make a backup, you need to open the file to read it (and copy it somewhere else).

Windows VSS solves this by making a snapshot of the drive, and you can then copy from this (stable) snapshot. There is all manner of clever magical stuff goes on but the essence of it is that the drive looks like it has become 2 drives: the one which is normally in use, and new one which is a snapshot copy of the one in use, but which is read-only. Of course, there are not actually 2 drives. The snapshot copy is the same drive with some clever software sitting in between which effectively says "while the fake new drive exists the data you want for file X is located at AAAAA", and at the same time the original drive beig updated by some applicaiton is being told "the data you want for that same file X is located at BBBBB".

Windows VSS manages this.

As a rough generalisation, pulling a backup makes it more difficult to use windows VSS. Running backup s/w on the PC means that it can create the windows VSS snapshot, copy files from that snapshot to the back, and release the snapshot when it is done.

[Obligatory disclaimer: my backup s/w does all these things. It runs on the PC and does not rely on the NAS pulling things down from the PC. If you are further interested, check out QuickShadow Backup - there are other postings on this forum which describe it and give the download URL.]