Forum Discussion

John_Novotny's avatar
John_Novotny
Level 3
16 years ago

BESR 8 loses track of number of recovery points

I have been using BESR 8 (8.0.4.30166) for about 1 year now, and recently, the feature that is to keep tract of how many backup historical recovery points there are stored, seems to get confused, and go past that number.  For example, I have it set to keep 4 historical backup recovery points, and it will seem to work well for a few weeks, and then (for no seemingly good reason) will forget that number, and start saving recovery points past 4, until it fills up my external hard drive.  When it fills up my hard drive, then it won't run the job, as it says the disk is full.  I even have enable the feature to automatically delete and manage the external drive so that if it does get full, it is supposed to delete the oldest one, and still run the job.  I run daily backups.

This problem is intermittent.

Some of my past solutions have been to delete the job and rebuild the job, I have even completely uninstalled and reinstalled the BESR software (with all updates).  It seems to work for a while, and then will at some point forget the backup maxium I want to keep.

I do full recovery points, not incremental.

My server is a HP ProLiant ML350 G4p, with Windows Server 2003 R2, with all the updates.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John
Backup and Recovery
BESR 8.x
Configuring
Features
System Recovery
  • pfx82's avatar
    pfx82
    Level 4
    16 years ago
    The biggest thing to make the image file monitor have problems is changing out your external drive.
    There have been posts on this for a long time.

    Are you rotating external drives at all?
  • John_Novotny's avatar
    John_Novotny
    Level 3
    16 years ago
    Yes, I have now discovered the the changing of external hard drives is a problem.  But, I need to exchange external hard drives in order to protect my data off site.

    After weeks of frustration about this issue, I have not determined if this is fixed in 8.5. I didn't want to spend the money on 8.5 just to see, so I am staying with 8.0 for now.

    However, I did read in one of the forums about this, to try to write a script that would run from task manager, and simply let it delele and manage the recovery points "outside" of BESR. So I tracked down a vbs script that works. In my case, I set BESR to not keep track of any recovery points, and I have my script set to delete any recovery point that is over 3 days old. This can be set to whatever you want, depending on the size of your backup drive/disk.

    Here is the script I used, and I run it through task manager, and it seems to be working fine. In the script, my backup drive is "O", but you can edit accordingly to your drive letter. Hope this helps anyone who is having the same problem.

    strComputer = "."

    Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

    Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
    & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

    Set FileList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    ("ASSOCIATORS OF {Win32_Directory.Name='O:\'} Where " _
    & "ResultClass = CIM_DataFile")

    For Each objFile In FileList
    Set f = objFSO.GetFile(objFile.Name)
    If DateDiff("d",f.DateLastModified, Date) > 3 Then
    If objFile.Extension = "v2i" Then
    objFile.Delete
    End If
    End If
    Next

    ---------------------------------

    So my problem is resolved and my backups work great now.