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Hi all

Just wondering if anyone here that uses unitrends backup appliances can give me a heads up as to why our backups with the appliance are suddenly failing?

We have had the appliance about a year now to protect two servers, its worked flawlessly and ive been happy with it, but the last week the automatic backups have failed (i came back from holiday to find a lot of failed backups)

The exchange backup failed first - i thought maybee there was a problem with our database, but it backed up fine using ntbackup. Then i thought there was a problem with connectivity, but our second server is backing up fine.

Now the master backups are failing too- with the same error code (see below)

Thanks

SignalWriterEvents: USNAPError! Writer has failed PrepareBackup request.

----- End Error Messages -----

FATAL: No backup data received from client.
The database update was successful.

@VMware

7 Spice ups
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I get this rarely, and usually checking the device being backed up shows a vss snapshot either failed to create, or was already created. I got mine to go away with the recent update, but you may wind up having to open a ticket with unitrends to get it fully dealt with.

a few things you can check, based on how it’s being backed up-

check the windows event logs, especially for weird event id 55 errors

check the shadow writers/providers for errors (run vssadmin from an elevated command prompt for more details on how)

if these are VM’s under vmware, check the host logs- my biggest headache turned out to come from the virtual floppy drive of all things- for some reason, the UEB had gotten the idea that it must backup the floppy, and kept trying to snapshot it- so it would literally fire off three snapshot requests in a row, letting each snap live for maybe 30 seconds. windows tried valiantly to keep up, but couldn’t create/close shadows fast enough.

EDIT: also, I’m pretty far from a unitrend expert, but I thought I’d share what I wound up having to do to take care of a similar issue with it.

1 Spice up
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Thanks magnus

I think it may be a VSS error too- i do know the network dropped in the early hours on friday half way through a backup, ill do the checks you suggest thanks.

Im just trying a manual master backup now- it is freezing on ‘waiting for client’ it seems. (And everyone is phoning me to inform me the server is slow :wink: )

Thanks again

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Trev - please let Katie or I know if you need anything!

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Magnus is right, VSS died. Fix that and check your change journals too. Reboot the server or at least restart the bpagent service. Try the backups again. Oh, running masters during the day when the server is actually doing it’s job slows down mine also.

If you got support just call their helpdesk, they are great. Pretty decent forums and KB also,

http://www.unitrends.com/forum/forum.php

http://support.unitrends.com/ikm/

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Trev - I just spotted this post. Please let me know if you need any help connecting with our Support team.

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Hey all

the problem seems to be the d drive (our second drive). When i reboot, trying to access the d drive freezes up, i suspect it is on its way out

it has very little on it - about 20gb of data. And it was the drive for swapfiles as well (ive switched that to c drive and performance has improved dramatically.

However the unitrends agent is installed on the d drive as well. Which would explain my problems?

I am pretty sure i can restore the files on the d drive to a directory in the c drive- however im not sure of the quickest way

to get the agent onto the c drive.

Im thinking i should just download the latest msi files and install to c:\ but will i have to re-register etc ?

Thanks

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thanks jenn and katie, i think i know what the problem is (see above) but im not sure of the quickest way to resolve it yet :wink:

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Uninstall the bpagent, reinstall it on the c: drive.

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Trev - I’ve alerted support to your issue and they should be reaching out shortly.

1 Spice up
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Thanks katie,

Reinstalling the agent on the none faulty drive seems have got exchange backups working again (10gb done on exchange…40gb to go)

And im very impressed indeed with the support response, it was pretty much instant!

Thanks for all the help.

1 Spice up
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Anytime! Thank you for choosing Unitrends :slight_smile:

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Just an update-

Restoring files that were on the failed drive went smoothly, the exchange backup was fine, and the fresh master backup is going fine… it looks like the appliance did exactly as it is supposed to :wink:

Thanks for all the help all.

Trev

1 Spice up
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Awesome! I’m so glad to hear that your Unitrends appliance is meeting your expectations! Thank you for choosing Unitrends!