Windows Server Backup and USB Pensticks (not external HDD)

[sonofsanta]

Does anyone know how I can lie to Windows Server Backup about the nature of the USB media I have connected? Windows Server Backup absolutely refuses to recognise a USB penstick as a valid target for either backup or restore, which is a right PITA as the 64GB stick I have is plenty big enough for the 30GB BMR image of my DC. I've got a nice, ruggedized penstick for the purpose (disaster recovery), and I trust it more than I would an external HDD to store the data without breaking, but WSB just won't let me use it.

 

A USB HDD works fine and immediately when connected to the machine I'm testing on (using the same USB port), so I'm thinking that Windows is somehow, someway working out what it is that's attached and then discriminating accordingly. If I can lie to Windows about the penstick then I can use that happily, but otherwise I need to get a ruggedized external HDD simply to keep a software limitation happy.

 

Stick & drive are both formatted as NTFS, so it's not filesystem related.

[sonofsanta]

Saying that - and don't these problems always solve themselves as soon as you open your mouth? - it seems I can just copy the BMR backup to the C drive and recover from there once booting into DSRM. Weeks I've been fighting this, as soon as I make a post, a solution presents. Bah!

[AngryTechnician]

I usually just configure WSB using the command line to get around problems like this. That doesn't give two hoots what the actual device is so long as it's NTFS formatted. Windows Backup (on client SKUs) won't show iSCSI drives in the list despite them showing in the server version, but set it up using the command line and it backs up just fine.

[sonofsanta]

wbadmin didn't show any valid backups when run against I: (as the penstick was at the time), even though the self-same image, copied over from the penstick to local storage, worked fine.

 

Turns out local storage is no good, either: even if I partition the internal HDD, Restore insists on wiping the entire 240GB drive even though the image I'm restoring is only 40GB. It seems to be working from a portable HDD right now, and if there is no other way around it I will just get a portable HDD and keep the image on that and the penstick, but it's a PITA. Once again, I am undone by a computer thinking it knows best and trying to be helpful.