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Hey Spiceheads!

I have been struggling this weekend to get some basic things figured out with Unitrends and tried to turn to Unitrends support forums but have been striking out. I am doing a bake-off of sorts with Unitrends and Veeam for my Windows clients and it’s likely that in the future (when my current paid Unitrends license is up for renewal) I am going to try to standardize on one vendor or the other for all of the business backup needs. I like Unitrends but support is a tough nut to crack.

I have a paid for version of Unitrends Backup that I use for back up of my critical VM infrastructure and have deployed a second VM instance of Unitrends Free that I was hoping to use for backup of my client devices, which are a mix of Windows 7 and Windows 10 PC clients.

When I try to log into Unitrends Forums to ask questions there doesn’t appear to be the option to register an account. What’s more, the email addresses that I used for license delivery for my paid account don’t seem to work when I choose to recover my password.

Does anyone know what needs to be done to get registered? I spent quite a lot of time over the weekend trying (unsuccessfully) to test create and test bare metal recovery of a client using Unitrends Free and am getting increasingly frustrated with Unitrends support setup.

In the event there are any Unitrends experts here, these are the problems;

  1. Windows recovery images are supposed to be in the //unitrends_device_ip/virtual_recovery share but I cannot access this share from any client PCs on the network. I can see the share and try to map it but I get a non-specific error that the resource is not available. I would think this is related to the domain login and name I am using to try to map the drive but logging in with the Unitrends appliance root password doesn’t seem to work.

  2. I tried doing a bare metal recovery backup using the media that can be created for a client, but this also failed… on one client I got an error that “applying settings failed” and on a different client the settings were applied successfully but the keyboard would not work.

  3. I am having issues downloading Unitrends client applications, update packages, etc. It appears that ,for reasons that somewhat baffle me, Unitrends is hosting a lot of things on either naked FTP or naked HTTP instead of using valid security certificates and this is driving my firewall crazy. I’ve put some exceptions in but haven’t been able to fully resolve the issue (have a request in with the Firewall vendor to help further resolve the issue)… does anyone know what is going on at Unitrends that they are lagging the industry so badly in this area? Chrome and other browsers will soon be shutting off support for HTTP and FTP completely.

Thanks! Tagging Katie in case she knows of anyone at Unitrends who can help.

Katie (Unitrends)

@katie

2 Spice ups
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I think there is an issue due to the SMB version as far as accessing this share and versions of Windows cannot access it.

https://support.unitrends.com/UnitrendsBackup/s/question/0D54000004aGfGbCAK/smb-20-support

I am not sure bare metal recovery is even supported any longer. I gave up on that long ago since everything is virtualized in our environment and everything else I can do from scratch.

I had problems with updates due to SMB version and my firewall actively blocking the connections. If I am not mistaken their stuff is on AWS so it is all over the place as far as trying to whitelist anything from them.

3

Thanks Rocknfor the reply! I don’t think that SMB is the issue as I am able to map other shares on the appliance including the share that has the bare metal boot discs I created through the Unitrends backup console.

If bare metal restores are not supported it will be a deal killer for me. The business has many Win7 and Win10 clients that are not virtualized and I need the ability to recover them quickly in the event they become corrupted, need a drive replacement, etc.

Unitrends support resources seem to indicate bare metal recovery is supported even though I can’t get it to work.

@rockn

4

Jason - First, thanks for choosing Unitrends! Second, this details how to register for a community account, however, given the nature of your needs, I’d encourage you to call support since all customers who have a current support contract can call our team 24/7/365. They can answer your questions about your Windows recovery images, BareMetal backups, client downloads, and ensure that your community account is setup as it should be.

US customers can use this number: 1.888.374.6124

And for any other paid customers who may stumble upon this thread, here are the other numbers for support:

International: +1.855.593.2861

UK: (0808) 101 7687

France: 08 05 08 04 29

Germany: (080) 0723 8445

Please let me know what other questions you may have.

5

Bare metal recovery is indeed still supported and completely useful and valid. I just did one about 2 months ago.

1 Spice up
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Don’t worry Jason, bare metal recovery/restore is still very much supported and useful. I just did one 2 months ago on a workstation using the general bare metal recovery ISO included.

7

Okay, little update here. I reached out to support as Katie (Unitrends) suggested. I identified the product with paid support to the support agent and then said I had some questions about another install with the free version of the backup appliance.

The agent said that I’ve been given incorrect information and that the only support for the free version is via community support, even if I have paid licenses for other versions of the product.

The agent did try to help me a bit though;

  1. He couldn’t explain why the virtual_recovery share was showing up when trying to map drives with SMB but could not be accessed. A quick investigation of the file system showed that the files did not exist.

  2. The support agent theorized that this might not be a supported feature on the free version and wasn’t sure what features were and were not supported on the free version as he’s “never even logged into that product”.

  3. He then suggested downloading the images from the other installation of the backup appliance, and on that installation they were indeed present.

  4. I burned the recovery media and booted my test Windows 7 box. After pointing it to the correct server it indicated no backups were available to be recovered (even though I had done multiple one-time full backups of the machine in question).

  5. I kicked off a new “full” backup manually from the backup appliance console. The backup completed with a warning that some files were locked and in use and could not be backed up.

  6. I tried recovery again and saw that my new “full” backup was available for recovery. I installed my replacement drive and started recovery with fingers crossed.

  7. Recovery failed, the error indicated that the recovery could not be completed because the system environment was not backed up as part of the backup.

Looks like I need to keep digging. I’m making headway but it is taking far too long to get this going. I will get registered for the support forums and see if I can find more information there about causes and solutions to “system environment” not getting backed up.

@katie

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As for the backup with the warning, have you reviewed the logs under c:\pcbp\logs.dir\ to see what the details show? (Sort by modified date then look at the last 5 or so.) the ones you want to look at are the last two WBPS_##.log and the pcbp.log

On #4, when you say there were no backups to recover from, were you looking at the client or the server? If you look at the server GUI are there backups listed there?

FYI I have not used the free edition so I do not know what differences there are.

9

Hey Quest John!

The following messages appear in the server log for the backup that completed successfully with a warning;

What’s odd is that the backup from this computer completed the first time I ran it on Saturday with no warnings or errors but the server never showed any backups were available for recovery when I connected from the client today until I re-ran the backup again and got the backup with the warnings (which then failed to recover).

This client is not that old, and I was planning on upgrading it to Windows 10 sometime later this year but thought it would be a good candidate for doing a recovery test with Unitrends. I backed up and restored an even older client with Veeam successfully a month or two ago.

I would be happy if I could get Unitrends working since I’m already using it to back up my VMWare environment, it’s one less thing to have to remember at the location and the deduplication capabilities that even Unitrends Free offers would be great from a storage cost perspective.

----- End Summary Messages -----
----- Error Messages -----
****> ERROR: 3 Files incompletely backed up. For more information, review backup catalog file.
Including 3 files failed due to locking problem.
****> ERROR: 21 Files not backed up. For more information, review backup catalog file.
----- End Error Messages -----
----- Client Messages -----
Unitrends agent successfully backed up disk environment metadata.
System state file 'C:/PCBP/Metadata.dir/Backup/j_86/.Unitrends.SystemState.bkf' is ready; size 234018725
Unitrends agent successfully backed up system state metadata.
Allowable incomplete rule was applied on client.
----- End Client Messages -----
----- Files Messages -----
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiilhag.inf BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atikmdag.sys BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumd64.dll BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumd6a.cap BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumd6a.dll BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumdag.dll BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumdva.cap BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/atiumdva.dll BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativcaxx.cpa BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativcaxx.vp BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativdkxx.vp BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativokxx.vp BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativpkxx.vp BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd/ativvpxx.vp BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiilhag.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_03c46b205be81dfd BP: Skipped because failed to read the attributes of the file. The system cannot find the file specified. (2)
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiriol6.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_a909ad21d26d5bd0 BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_auditpolicygpmanagedstubs.interop_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_7dea25c08325286d BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_avc.inf.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_en-us_700d963de350befa BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_avc.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_084e3f0eabcf1e24 BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_averfx2hbh826d_noaverir_x64.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_3cfa3158fd5ab28e BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs BP: Skipped because failed to read the attributes of the file. The system cannot find the file specified. (2)
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_atiriol6.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_a909ad21d26d5bd0 BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_auditpolicygpmanagedstubs.interop_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_7dea25c08325286d BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_avc.inf.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_en-us_700d963de350befa BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_avc.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_084e3f0eabcf1e24 BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs/amd64_averfx2hbh826d_noaverir_x64.inf_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_3cfa3158fd5ab28e BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/winsxs BP: Skipped because failed to read the attributes of the file. The system cannot find the file specified. (2)
C:/Windows/WMSysPr9.prx BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows/write.exe BP: is not accessible, access denied.
C:/Windows BP: Skipped because failed to read the attributes of the file. The system cannot find the file specified. (2)

@johnt0828

10

Looking back some more at the logs it looks like the earlier successful backups I did on this client over the weekend were of the type “image level” backups, which don’t appear to be available for use for system restoration from bare metal.

The new “full” “file level” backup does appear to be a candidate for a bare metal restore but it looks like I would have to resolve the file issues with this machine.

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Those file issues really do not seem to be anything to worry about, to me anyways.

The message though about could not be recovered because system environment does not make sense, since the log snippet you posted indicates systemstate was captured. Opening the log in notepad, do a find for systemstate and see if you can find a line that starts with “file to appliance” that indicates the systemsstate backup was actually sent to the server.

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yeah the client log thinks that the system state was sent successfully;

01/21/19 17:25:01 : backup_sys_state_vss:: sends a keep alive connection 600 sec <OK>.
01/21/19 17:25:01 : Sending system state file to appliance: C:\PCBP\Metadata.dir\Backup\j_93\.Unitrends.SystemState.bkf
01/21/19 17:25:03 : backup_sys_state_vss : Unload system state agent now.
01/21/19 17:25:03 : Notify System State application to complete a backup.
01/21/19 17:25:03 : Unitrends agent sets System State application backup status: SUCCESS
*** The asynchronous operation 'GatherVssWriterStatus' elapsed 0.52 seconds
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent did not find any selected writers awaiting for backup to complete.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent is deleting <pSysStateVss>
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent is deleting <m_ClientVss>
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent IVssBackupComponents (m_pVssObject) pointer = 000000000042ADB0
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent IVssBackupComponents (m_pVssObject) was released!!!
01/21/19 17:25:04 : System State agent cleanup: 'C:\PCBP\Metadata.dir\Backup\j_93\'
01/21/19 17:25:04 : -----------------------------------
<Client> Unitrends agent successfully backed up system state metadata.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : Unitrends agent is excluding application files from file-level backup.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : The specified procedure VssAppInitialize was found.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : <HYPER-V APP VSS> VMDefaultVersion::668 failure:
01/21/19 17:25:04 : Hyper-V role is not installed.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : LoadAppVssSupport::1021 failure.
01/21/19 17:25:04 : Unitrends agent failed Hyper-V application.

But when I tried the restore it failed, unfortunately I think I blew away the recovery event that failed since that was a choice after it went bust.

13

Jason - My apologies - from your original post, it seemed that you were having issues with your paid license, and there was no mention of using the free edition. As has been mentioned numerous times here in the Spiceworks community, as well as on the edition comparison page on our website, users of the Free editions, even those that also have a paid support contract on another product, can only get support for their free edition deployment via the Unitrends Free Support Community . We have specific engineers allocated to supporting users in our community, so many of our engineers that man our support phones have not had first hand experience with the free editions. If you’re still having issues logging into the support community after following the instructions I linked to above, please let me know. If you’re trying to do a bake-off between Unitrends & other solutions, and want support, our 30-day trial is the way to go.

Can you tell me specifically what OS the client is whose backup is failing? Are you trying to protect any applications on this client?

14

Hi Katie,

The bake-off in this case is trying to figure out what backup solution to use for my endpoints as my servers are already being taken care of by a licensed Unitrends VM appliance.

Obviously it would be great to have a common platform for all of the backup/restores in the business but so far I have not been able to get Unitrends to work for the purpose of backup/bare-metal restore of clients I have tested it with.

I also don’t want to spend the money on paid licenses for the clients with Unitrends if I can’t even get the free version to work.

When I was setting up the paid appliance that backs up my VMWare environment the engineer who assisted with that suggested that the free edition could meet my needs for backup of the clients and I’ve been trying off and on to get it working ever since.

I have several older Windows 7 clients in the business that are out of disk space and I would prefer to use this as an opportunity to test full backup/restore capability of various vendors products.

Client #1 I could never get working with Unitrends due to my previous documented issues getting Unitrends and ESET to play nice with each other. That client ended up getting backed up and restored using Veeam, which while not perfect (onboard NIC had no driver support) was ultimately successful.

Client #2 is a similar machine, Windows 7, Intel NUC that is running business applications I’d like to preserve during the upgrade, which is why full disk image/restore is probably the easiest approach for me.

Ultimately these clients are all going to get upgraded to Windows 10, but this seemed like a good opportunity to test full backup/restore capabilities of physical endpoints since in my experience I will need to recover a physical endpoint at least once or twice a year, either due to a drive failure, corruption issue, bad software update, etc.

15

Jason - Thanks for these details. Usually, issues with deployment are related to not following the steps outlined in our deployment guid e, including ensuring that you have the proper resources allocated to the deployment, and making sure that your backups are less than 1TB total. There are 4 different Windows 7 clients that we can protect as outlined in our interoperability & compatibility matrix :

WIndows_7.jpg
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Is one of these versions what your clients are running?

Also, our free edition has some limitations that our trial does not, namely that our free editions:

  • Can only protect 1TB of data
  • Can only protect Windows, Hyper-V, & VMware clients
  • Are not application aware
  • Can only be supported via our online support community

While our trial can protect as many clients as you want without any limits to the total data size, can protect all of the clients, including applications, that are listed in our interoperabilty & compatibility matrix, and includes access to our award winning support team. The only limit to our trial is that it’s only good for 30 days.

16

Hi Katie,

On the next page of the interoperability guide that you linked are quite a few additional clients including the ones I am running in the business (Windows 7 Professional .SP1 x64)

Also shows the Windows 10 versions supported (most of my clients have been updated to Windows 10.

I will try to get my support account situation straightened out today and post my questions in the community forum to see if anyone has any ideas of how to get the issues resolved.

Thanks.

2019-01-22_8-01-54.png
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17

Jason - Thanks for confirming that your OSs are listed on our compatibility & interoperability sheet. Please let me know if you have issues logging into the free support community.

18

It took a while but I finally got the account created. It looks like possibly my “free” community account and my paid account are using the same handle/email. Hopefully that doesn’t bite me later.

Thanks Katie (Unitrends) for all of the helpful tips. I’ve posted my question in the community and hopefully someone is able to help me further troubleshoot the issue.

@katie

19

Jason, there is one thing I have learned: Never use a primary email address for a community forum unless you are accessing that forum for a paid product.

1 Spice up
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Happy to help - and I agree with John - if you have a way to use a different email for one of those uses, that will reduce a lot of chaos on your end.