Redstor Major FUBAR [WARNING]

[Tefters]

Afternoon all,

 

Big warning for all Redstor customers: I currently have a server down and did a full server restore from Redstor on Thursday to VHDX and the OS C:\ drive was corrupt (NTFS), I managed to do a fix and get it up and running and everything seemed OK for 36 hours until I came in this morning and the server is dead and I cannot recover from the NTFS corruption a second time.

 

Got a ticket raised with Redstor and this is what I got as a response:

 

Thank you for providing the server operating system.

As the affected server is running Windows Server 2019 or later, this is a known issue affecting VHDX restores on these versions of Windows.

 

Our Machines team is currently investigating the issue. I am checking with them for the latest findings and will provide an update as soon as I have further information.

 

So that means I cannot do any full server restores at present in case of DR, pretty big f**k up if you ask me!

Now frantically looking at building a whole new server OS and re-installing everything from scratch with all apps, configs, schedules and tweaks.

 

Need to find out who the head of the UK education division for Redstor is and start claiming compensation. Not what i needed at the start of a new term!

Edited September 7 by Tefters

[Tefters]

Update from Redstor:

 

Restoring to date before August will be fine, there is currently an issue we dealing with where the latest accumulative security updates from Microsoft will cause corruption of the filesystem. So once you have restores the server be sure to stop windows updates from deploying to that server. This is particular to vdhx restores and windows 2019 and above. Development is currently working on a resolution but unfortunately it will not be a quick fix. I do apologise for the inconvenience this will cause, I ask the guys to keep you up to date with the progress as we work trough this problem.

 

So lets hope no-one has to restore any virtual servers in Hyper-V or Azure hey! 🤬

Edited September 7 by Tefters

[pete]

Guessing there weren't any comms to customers about this choice between security updates or functional backups?

[Tefters]

5 minutes ago, pete said:

Guessing there weren't any comms to customers about this choice between security updates or functional backups?

Of course not, who wants to advise their customers that full DR recovery in a Windows virtual environment is not possible?

[TechJoe]

As it happens, I fell victim to this as a new customer when wanting to do a test restore. There were quite a few new variables with my test, so I didn't go straight to the backups being dodgy, but it happens that they came to the revelation of the Windows update from August causing the issue eventually. This was after a fair bit of back and forth, even going so far as going from a Hyper-V restore to a VMware restore and back. They seemed either reluctant to acknowledge the issue with the update preventing functional restores, or perhaps they weren't even confident at the time. I essentially helped them prove it by restoring a backup from the previous month successfully, which they seemed grateful for which suggests to me they weren't entirely sure at the time as to the cause.

 

Fair to say I am not the happiest new customer.

 

As to their note about it affecting VHDx restores, that isn't stricly true - I also couldn't boot my restored VM when it was in VMDK format either!

Edited September 10 by TechJoe

[Squelch]

I didn't like their server backup/restore process so I kept veeam for that and redstor for the 365 backup.