Backup Exec 2012 vs $Extend was not found or could not be accessed

[Typeroon]

Hello, 

Fist of all, please excuse my english if it is not always correct.  This is not my first languate.

I am having a problem with BE 2012.    I am backing up multiple windows 2008 R2 servers and 2 of them are returning the following error message in the job log.

Directory \\ServerName\DriveLetter\FolderName\$Extend was not found, or could not be accessed.

I have searched on the net about this $Extend partition or folder or whatever it is and it seems to be something related to the system and it is not accessible.  And it seems that if we do not back-it-up, it is not a problem.  The server will still be restorable in case of crash.

So far, i am ok with that.  But how can I exclude it from the job selection list if it is not visible or accessible.   I would like to have my backup job being finished with a status of "completed successfully" instead of "Backup failed"  all the time.

Also, as I said at the beginning, I am backing-up multiple windows 2008 R2 servers and only 2 of them gives this error.    Does $Extend is part of the system or not.  if yes, why it does not give error on other servers.

I read posts on the web saying that all I have to do is to give security permission to the backup account but I cannot see it so how can I do it.

The only post by Symantec, that I found is the following and is related to product BE 12.5  and 12.0   and Symantec confirms that This error can be ignored. Restore operations from these backup sets will not be affected.   But I still would like to avoid the Backup failure error message.

I am using BE 2012 SP3

The 2 servers that give this error are 2 Microsoft Exchange 2010 Servers that are DAGed together.   So if the error occurs on one, it will occurs on the other one since both are configured the same way, witht the following configuration.

C: (System files)

E: (Pagefile)

F: (Exchange Program files)

G: (Transaction Logs) 

H: (Databases)

The problem occurs on the G: partition.    What is weird with this partition is that it contains only a mount poing to a hidden partition that has no drive letters.  

I am not the one who configured it like this.  It has been configured by a consultant who said it was the correct way to do it.   Unfortunately, the consultant is no longer available.

Any help would be appreciated.

[pkh]

$extend is part of NTFS and is a hidden system folder.

Try unchecking these options and reruning your job.

[Typeroon]

Hi pkh,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I tried it with the options checked and unchecked and there is no difference.  I always have the same problem.

It is really weird why only 2 of the multiple Windows 2008 R2 servers I am backing-up, are returning this error in the backup job log, assuming that this %Extend is on every Windows 2008 R2 servers (since it is part of the file system).

For your info, here is the link where Symantec officialy discuss that problem but for BE 12.5

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH74951

But there is nothing explaining what to do except to ignore the error.  I love it when Symantec does that.

Any other idea ?

If the $Extend partition of folder or whatever it is,  is not necessary in the backup.  how can we just exclude it from the selection list if we cannot at least see it ?

Thanks in advance.

[bthorp]

I too have started to get this error.

Unchecking the box would basically, from what I can tell break our backup process.

We are getting this issue on a file server I did not setup -

C:\File Server\ has multiple mounted drives to folders such as 'Share' or 'Home' within it, and I get this error on all of them now and nothing has changed.

[Colin_Weaver]

The quoted technote was actually believed fixed as we apparently introduced code to exclude the NTFS metadata objects such as all the following:

$Extend
$AttrDef
$BadClus
$Bitmap
$Boot
$LogFile
$MFT
$MFTMirr
$Secure
$UpCase
$Volume

As you now seem to be experiencing this with the latest version of Backup Exec then we need to look into it more thoroughly, as such affected customers should log a formal support case.