Moving to USB drives

[nohero]

We use firestreamer RM with NTbackup on our Windows Server 2003

We have been using it successfully with Iomega Rev70 Drives spanning 2 drives nightly for a while now, but recently it is freezing during a backup each night, not on any particular file but at random times during the backup. I have tried resetting our RSM catalogue etc as I normally would and formatting the tapes, do you think this is more likely to be a drive fault as there are no indicators of anything else in the logs?

The other advice I need is that in order to test this out I am now switching the backup to use USB portable HDDs. I have bought an Iomega Ego drive and formatted it as NTFS and put the required name folder on the drive so that it is usable by Firestreamer. The drive showed up in the activity monitor as 'unrecognised media' so I fire up NTbackup and didn't get the new media prompt. I then disabled firestreamer and reenabled it and the prompt came up so I prepared the media as normal and now it just shows up as media loaded. Is that correct?

The drive i bought shows up as a HDD 'h' and a CD rom drive 'i' I have gone in to the media libraries and unticked the box to use the cd drive as a library, just leaving firestreamer enabled. Is that OK? The i drive shows in the activity log as unprepared, but i dont want to use it anyway just the HDD drive 'h'

The final thing is before I go ahead and buy 4 more of these drives to use I want to test it with this same ego drive daily. What settings do I need to make so that it happily used the drive again on monday, tuesday etc without me having to reprepare it. or is that what I need to do?

Many thanks

John

[jsf]

Is it the entire server or just NTBackup freezing? Check if the available memory constantly decreases during a backup. If so, there's a memory leak somewhere.

As long as the drive is recognized by Firestreamer as usable, and Firestreamer connects to it, it's correct.

Disable all libraries in RSM, except of Firestreamer.

You need to use Firestreamer-RM Wrapper for [almost] hassle free backups.

[nohero]

Just NT backup freezing, tonight I ran it with the ego drive instead of the rev and it froze again. The server still runs although I did have a few server crashes last week which I put down to ntbackup stalling for 10 hours plus.

[jsf]

Unfortunately, NTBackup is quite a buggy piece of software. Try to back up to a bkf file instead of tape, to see if it makes any difference. Check the Microsoft website for any relevant hotfixes.

[nohero]

Thanks for the help

OK a backup file on the ego usb drive worked fine.

So is the bug/freezing/crashing only when NTBackup uses Firestreamer RM? Have you heard of this before, unusual it has worked perfectly for a while without any changes on the server.

Any thoughts on this?

[jsf]

NTBackup uses different code for tapes and BKF files. Tapes are more complicated and accessed via Removable Storage. Both NTBackup and RSM are very buggy. It's likely that there's a timing issue (deadlock) in NTBackup or RSM that shows up more frequently under certain conditions, which could be anything, like a new or updated piece of software, fragmented HDD, low memory, bad memory, insufficient disk space, etc.

[nohero]

Thanks

I'll see how tonight's filebackup goes