First, my environment - a small office with a file server and an Exchange server, both are 2008 Servers. I'm running BE 2010. Using a Qnap NAS device (4 drives in a RAID 6 setup, connected via iSCSI) to try to get D2D2T backups. I have a small Quantum autochanger with LTO4 tapes. This ensemble used to work just fine up until just after the beginning of the year.
Currently I have the backup jobs broken down into an Exchange backup that runs first to disk, then dupes to tape, followed by the file server. The first backup errors are 0xe000fed1 - failure querying the Writer status. As a result of that, I tried setting the VSS writer to restart itself if it failed. Most of the other cures (including the long list of dll's to re-register) seem to be only for Server 2003.
After the Exchange backups fail, I get VSS errors backing up the file server as well, but those are different codes - 0x80042306, which says that the snapshot failed.
As a part of this troubleshooting, I did find that my Exchange mail database had gotten fragmented enough that it wasn't completing the auto defrag, so over the weekend I moved all my users to a new mail database, and that fixed that problem. But I'm still getting the VSS errors. I've removed the old database from the backup list and added the new one - backups still fail, same errors.
The only thing I can think of - and I'm not sure why this is happening - is that the Qnap device reports itself as full. BE is set to overwrite the media on that device after just a couple of weeks, but the device still squeals, although it seems to be overwriting when it's doing the half-backups that it fails on. There's nothing in the logs that I've seen that says anything about problems overwriting the old media being an issue, but the server complains that there's a disk error on the Qnap device, even though Qnap doesn't see anything wrong with it. So I was wondering if perhaps there -is- a bad disk, but any test I try running on the Qnap device says the disks are fine. I'm wondering if I might have a problem that's causing a cascading series of issues, but I can't pin down what the real source is, and I'm in need of another idea.
For the moment, with no useful backups on the Qnap device, I'm going to try wiping the (by now, kinda useless) data on there to at least see if I can get rid of the 'disk full' errors. Perhaps there's some error I'm not seeing from that, that's making VSS freak out. I think it's not the core issue, but it's something to pursue until I can get a better idea of what's going wrong with the VSS writers.
Help!
CraigV
It's only going to cause further issues, or simply not help at all.
