How to backup a USB Drive

[Linas]

I am using BESR2010 Management to manage my desktops

On my workstation I have 2 partitions on my hard drive and an external USB3 hard drive

I want to backup my desktop and the USB drive

The management server shows my desktop at risk because my USB drive is not backed up

I can not create a backup policy because the drive letter is not shown and thus can not back it up

I tried backup all drives but too much data and backup fails

[criley]

Does the USB drive have a drive letter assigned to it? If not, try that.

And does the local BESR client 'see' the USB drive?

[Linas]

Yes the USB Drive has a drive letter

Yes the client pc sees the drive letter

Yes the client shows the pc at risk because the USB drive is not backed up

Yes the Management console shows the client at risk because the USB drive letter is not backed up

But when I try to make a backup policy for the specific drive letter it is not there

I have 3 Pac’s with the same issue they have a permanently attached USB drive for data the Pc’s are marked at risk the management server see’s the drive not getting backed up but the drive letter is not on list of drive letters to backup

[criley]

Linas; OK, it looks like I'm seeing the same thing here.

The local BESR client 'sees' my USB drive but that information is just not getting passed back to the BESR-MS server for some reason.

I'm looking into this so leave it with me. I'll post back here when I have some news.

Any questions, let me know.

[criley]

This appears to be a defect so I have gone ahead and escalated the issue:

More information here:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/issue/usb-attached-drives-not-available-backup-besr-ms

[Linas]

It took a wile but it seems to work

One desktop backed up rite away

The second just started so I got it to backup a USB drive attached to a desktop with BESR2010MS

Now if I can just get it to backup my c drive!

[criley]

How exactly did you get this to work?

[Dushan_Gomez]

Chris,

When will be the next release for BESR 2010 ?

Please let us know here in the thread :)

[Linas]

Simple really

It seems the only thing stopping you from backing it up is being able to select the drive letter

On my workstation my USB drive is drive L and on another Workstation we needed to backup there G drive

So I set up a work station and I partitioned a drive with the corresponding drive letters

I needed to backup G and L

So when I created the backup policy drive G an L is in the list of drives to backup

Scheduled the weekly backup and it works

[Kolmon]

Hi. I'm using BESR2010... not MS. I have never had a problem setting up a backup with an external USB drive before, but a new 3GB drive that I just installed directly on the same computer is not being seen by the full backup drive list when I try to create a new drive backup. I can find the drive when I look for it using the file backup menu, but it just doesn't show up in the full backup drive list. So I can't use the full and incremental backup option on that drive, and it makes no sense to use the file backup program to always backup the entire drive when I only want to backup new and changed files between full backups. I don't see anything in the above discussion that seems to point me in the right direction. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe this is a different issue.

Any ideas folks?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Linas]

In the management solution you can setup backup policies to backup desktops and servers across you network.

When you setup a backup policy you nave to choose what to backup

There is an option to backup all drive letters or individual drive letters

For some reason the management solution dose not see USB drive letters so to fool the system I manage a desktop and partitioned a drive with the drive letters of USB drives I needed to backup And now the drive letters are listed and can be selected to backup. 

After reading your post I am not sure if you are backing up the drive or backing up to the drive

Also you say a new 3GB drive do you mean a 3TB drive or SATAIII

I just got a new 3TB Sata II and Sata III drive and have lots of compatibility problems some times it sees a 750 gig drive and some times a 3TB drive also GTP file system may be an issue win7 and server 2003 and up can use GTP but XP and older can not

Also a read win7 64 has better support for 3TB drives and larger

And some motherboards will not boot if a 3TB drive is connected to either the on board Sata controller or an add on controller?

[Linas]

From another Post

To my knowledge, support of

To my knowledge, support of GPT is planned for a future release of BESR.

The next version (which is being renamed to SSR - Symantec System Recovery) which is due for release early next month unfortunately wont have support for GPT.

Sorry that I don't have better news for you at this time. 

Or should I say BESR2003

GTP was introduces around 2003 with windows server 2003

Come on Symantec GTP has been around for 8 years and its still planned?

[Linas]

Well it seems they changed SSR2010 so now USB drive show up in the management console so now you can back them up

But now this is a problem

When I backup all drives to bakup the hidden win7 partition it also backs up the usb drives and the job never completes the initial full backup go off ok but incramentals fail and the jobs never run and nothing backs up

So now I only backup the c drive and this is working but I can not backup the hidden partition.

So I can not restore for backup

How to backup hidden partition and C: but nothing else?

[criley]

Well it seems they changed SSR2010 so now USB drive show up in the management console so now you can back them up

So have you now updated to SSR-MS 2011 SP1 then?

When I backup all drives to bakup the hidden win7 partition it also backs up the usb drives and the job never completes the initial full backup go off ok but incramentals fail and the jobs never run and nothing backs up

So the problem is only with incremental backups then? What error do you see?

How to backup hidden partition and C: but nothing else?

I think you can only do this with an independent backup policy - so full backups only I'm afraid.

[Linas]

So I guess this is just to complicated to ask to backup 1 physical drive with 2 partitions

And no I didn’t upgrade you know as a paying customer it seems I am the last to know when a new product comes out

I am still struggling to deploy SSR2010 and now SSR2011 is out

Is the new version more windows 7 friendly?

I have yet to backup a win7 pc with SSR2010

[criley]

OK, I'm a bit confused now.

This issue is actually fixed in SP1 for SSR-MS 2011. But you are saying that you are using BESR-MS 2010.

What have you changed in your environment to enable these USB drives to be available in the management solution? This makes no sense to me...

I'm not sure what your issue is with Windows 7 but it sounds like a separate issue to me. There are no differences between BESR 2010 and SSR 2011 with regards Win 7.

[Linas]

Ya I am shocked I was on with support and just found out I am on SSR2011

There is no such thing as ssr2010

Olney BESR8.5 and SSR2011

I don’t know ware I got SSR2010 no such thing?

Any way I didn't do anything to enable USB drives I wish it wisent

Now I can not backup my boss’s computer

There goes my job

I liked it betted before the fix so I could choose to backup an usb drive or not now there is no choice backup nothing or only c drive with no hidden partition useless backup can not restore without

[criley]

I don’t know ware I got SSR2010 no such thing?

There is BESR 2010 and then SSR 2011. With the release of 2011, the name changed from BESR to SSR.

You need to confirm if you now have SSR-MS 2011 SP1. As I said, the USB issue is fixed in SP1. You can check the installed version in SIM (Symantec Installation Manager).

[Linas]

It’s obvious since USB drives are now getting backed up

Working with support we came up with a solution

We backup only c: on one backup

And have a separate “independent recovery point” backup to backup the hidden partition