Windows Backup

[OliverWaters]

Hey guys,

 

I am covering maternity for a school that I currently work in, which involves the entire IT department.

 

We use portable hard drives for back up purposes(ye ye I know) and we swap them out weekly.

 

The backups on the server are scheduled to run once a day at X time - however they are not running! (And haven't been since god knows when)

 

It states that the disk is offline, but under disk management it shows as online. The actual error presented is: The backup operation of the volume did not start.

 

Now could it be a corrupt drive? And should I recommend getting a mini tower ( I think I will do) with enough storage to safely update to?

 

I'm only covering maternity and don't want to change too much but backups are very important and need to fix this asap, any suggestions?

 

Oliver

[Joanne]

I would format the drive and set a backup going to it.

 

The way I have mine set up - TeraStation plugged in away from server, map terastation as a drive on server, create Virtual HDD on terastation, attach the VHD to the server in disk management, use that drive to send Windows Server Backups to.

Edited October 6, 2016 by Joanne

[OliverWaters]

I shall look into giving this a go, thanks for the quick response!

[ITJS2015]

With Server 2012 you will need to have both external HDD in as its an requirement when your backing up on a schedule. Once that is done you should be able to take one off and windows server backup should backup what you have selected.

[Kineas]

I would format the drive and set a backup going to it.

 

The way I have mine set up - TeraStation plugged in away from server, map terastation as a drive on server, create Virtual HDD on terastation, attach the VHD to the server in disk management, use that drive to send Windows Server Backups to.

 

I have this exact same setup. Depending on the size of your backup, it may be easier to just backup to a share on the NAS. If it's a big backup, then definitely a VHD to allow incremental backups that run quicker. Only problem I have with this setup is that I have to manually delete old backups every few weeks, usually it manages space itself and deletes old backups to make room for new ones, but it seems it needs minimum amount of space on the VHD to perform this which some backups run and don't leave it with.

[OliverWaters]

Came into the position and the company was using 2tb externals for the backing up of complete servers which involved a lot of hassle. We get a new SAN next week to do our complete back ups whilst using the externals for script saving. Thanks for all the answers.

[sted]

I have this exact same setup. Depending on the size of your backup, it may be easier to just backup to a share on the NAS. If it's a big backup, then definitely a VHD to allow incremental backups that run quicker. Only problem I have with this setup is that I have to manually delete old backups every few weeks, usually it manages space itself and deletes old backups to make room for new ones, but it seems it needs minimum amount of space on the VHD to perform this which some backups run and don't leave it with.

personally if your nas supports it id set it up as an iscsi host and use that in my experience thats better for windows backup as the server just thinks its a local drive and can treat it as such using smb iirc it can only store a single backup. I found the issue with vhd over smb is if/when the serer gets rebooted remembering to reattach it as i never found a way to reliably do this other than manually