Home Server (or Essentials?), StableBit, backup strategies and Volume Shadow Copies

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, folks. . . . I've been through a "growth period" of a couple weeks. I "learned stuff."

Here's my current WHS'11 rig:

60GB Mushkin Chronos SSD boot/system disk
4x 1TB HDDs -- destined for slow upgrade to >= 2TB units

the HDDs are pooled under StableBit 2.x.

Certain "Server Folders" are duplicated under the "immediately" setting. these are the "important" files.

The server backs up every workstation on the home LAN daily -- so that any one of them can be restored with a USB thumb drive and the server images to a new, clean HDD or SSD boot drive if the old one screws the pooch.

So "How to back up the server?" With StableBit (AFIK), you cannot use Windows (WHS) backup or Acronis True Image to image the pool drive. Imaging software is looking for low-level hardware data -- which StableBit doesn't provide. You could certainly use these backup options on a RAID0, RAID1 or RAID5 array, but not for a drive-pool.

I adopted this strategy.

1) Image the boot/system SSD to a hot-swap HDD
2) Image the respective drive pool "members" to the hot-swap HDD(s)
[UNRESOLVED ISSUE: Only "important" duplicated and unduplicated folders are imaged. For the duplicated folders/files -- how many images do I need to make? Not a critical problem, but it's solution would economize on the need for backup disks and images.]

Now. It should be clear to some, but not so clear to all. End-users with Win 7 or Win 8 workstations won't delve into the complexities of Volume Shadow Copies much if their "System Protection" feature is turned "on."

But in order for me to do daily boot-drive backups of all my workstations (automatically, incrementally), WHS is a "requestor" for the local workstation's Volume Shadow Copy service. So shadow copies are necessary for the workstations.

If I want to back up the server itself -- boot/system disk and drive-pool members -- they also must have Volume Shadow Copies enabled.

"Where will you store these shadow copies?"

The published wisdom -- for servers, anyway -- is to store volume shadow copies on a device or logical volume for which shadow copies are not implemented. But my boot/system disk is only 60GB with about 26GB used by OS and files -- and it has its own Volume Shadow Copy.

Shadow copies apparently grow in a sequence until there are 24 of them. Windows tells me I need at least 300 MB of space to create a shadow copy. I've currently enabled 5000 MB for the system drive and 10,000 MB each for the drive-pool's member volumes.

So -- as I said -- where to put them? I finally decided to shrink the volume and first disk in my drive pool, create a new 100GB volume on that drive, and put all the shadow copies there.

It seems to be working. But I haven't seen any thorough, consistent explanation or dissertation on this issue: where to put your volume shadow copies.

All six of my motherboard SATA ports are in use: one for the boot/system volume; four for the respective drive-pool members or 1TB HDDs; and one for my hot-swap bay and caddies for server backup.

So there are several questions. First, what do YOU think of my strategy?

Second, under this scenario, I could get another SATA-III PCI-E controller, and stick a >= 60GB SSD on it expressly for this purpose of storing shadow copies. Or -- I could replace my 60GB system SSD with a >= 120GB model; clone the 60 to the 120; shrink the boot volume; create another logical volume and store the shadow copies on it.

But there's at least another option.

Back in the day, I saw a little DIY project in Maximum PC which required putting a USB thumb drive inside your case -- with a stubby custom-cable you put together so you could plug it right into the standard mobo 9-pin USB plug. These days, you might look for a USB3 option for doing essentially the same. The purpose of this USB project was to enable a feature called "ReadyBoost" or "ReadyBoot" -- I can't exactly remember and it may be called something else.

But this doesn't seem like a much-discussed idea anymore.

Instead, what if you found the largest and most reliable USB3 flash drive you could find, installed it inside the case, and used it for volume shadow copy snap-shots from all the other drives in the system?

 

[Towermax]

So "How to back up the server?" With StableBit (AFIK), you cannot use Windows (WHS) backup or Acronis True Image to image the pool drive. Imaging software is looking for low-level hardware data -- which StableBit doesn't provide. You could certainly use these backup options on a RAID0, RAID1 or RAID5 array, but not for a drive-pool.

My home LAN and server setup is very similar to yours.

I don't know about StableBit 2.x, but WHS 2011 server backup works fine on my StableBit 1.x pool. I have four 1.5 TB Seagate drives in the pool and they all automatically backup just fine to an external USB3 drive. And yes, I've tested it . . .

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My home LAN and server setup is very similar to yours.

I don't know about StableBit 2.x, but WHS 2011 server backup works fine on my StableBit 1.x pool. I have four 1.5 TB Seagate drives in the pool and they all automatically backup just fine to an external USB3 drive. And yes, I've tested it . . .

You mean that you can back up your pool drive? In other words, if you have drives F:, G: . . . [N:] as drives added to the pool after being mounted, initialized, partitioned and formatted, and your pool drive is drive "E:" -- you can image "Drive E:" as a source drive?

I couldn't make a volume shadow copy of my pool drive, so I couldn't use the backup programs of either WHS or Acronis.

I had read somewhere else in forum posts of StableBit 2.x users that they couldn't do what I couldn't do, and they advocated the approach that I took. They were quite succinct: the apparent recommended method was a simple "file and folder" copy or XCOPY. I had done that, and I think I lost information for "file path too long" reasons.

 

[Dahak]

To be honest, you can leave the shadow copies on the same drive that they are being created on. they do not allow for a restore in any other fashion other than maybe system restore or previous versions.

Now backup software will require shadow copies enabled, more specifically VSS service as what they do is create a snapshot at the time of the backup and then it creates its image from that snapshot.

you can even restict it more via the command line vssadmin tool if you only want it to say have a max of 3 vs the default and you can adjust the amount of space there as well

 

[BonzaiDuck]

To be honest, you can leave the shadow copies on the same drive that they are being created on. they do not allow for a restore in any other fashion other than maybe system restore or previous versions.

Now backup software will require shadow copies enabled, more specifically VSS service as what they do is create a snapshot at the time of the backup and then it creates its image from that snapshot.

you can even restict it more via the command line vssadmin tool if you only want it to say have a max of 3 vs the default and you can adjust the amount of space there as well

Thanks!! That is very useful information!! Knowing that, I might actually be able to put all the shadow copies on a separate volume of the boot SSD -- or even on the same volume. I'll need to look up the syntax for "vssadmin"

 

[Towermax]

You mean that you can back up your pool drive? In other words, if you have drives F:, G: . . . [N:] as drives added to the pool after being mounted, initialized, partitioned and formatted, and your pool drive is drive "E:" -- you can image "Drive E:" as a source drive?

It doesn't backup the pool drive--it's backing up the individual drives. But since all the pool files are standard NTFS files, server backup works on them and StableBit can sort it all out when you have to restore. Here's a link to StableBit instructions for backing up the drive pool on WHS 2011:

http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/1.X/Manual?Section=Using Server Backup to Backup the Pool

 

[BonzaiDuck]

It doesn't backup the pool drive--it's backing up the individual drives. But since all the pool files are standard NTFS files, server backup works on them and StableBit can sort it all out when you have to restore. Here's a link to StableBit instructions for backing up the drive pool on WHS 2011:

http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/1.X/Manual?Section=Using Server Backup to Backup the Pool

Hah! Yes! The Cove-Cube Tech Rep who responded to my questions there pointed me in the same direction! But he confirmed what you say and what I thought -- and apparently I was on the right track with it.

The key to this is what you're pleased to call the "pool files" confirmed by the Tech Rep according to my observation of them being in directories/folders with the name "Pool.Part . .. [yada yada cryptic cryptic]".

His advice, though, was to back up all the drives, even if you have file replication in effect, but mentioned a technique with some shareware or other add-in/program which sequesters the complete files on a limited number of disks and accommodates the priorities in balancing drive usage.

Somebody here -- have to go back and look and it might be you -- remarked about the volume shadow copies and how to use a command-line "vssadmin" utility for limiting the multiplication of shadow copies to a number below the default 24. This would then allow control of the disk space used by the shadow copies, maybe even making my USB3 thumb drive idea more viable. Apparently, just limiting the amount of disk space for the shadow copies created for any particular disk/volume will throw up an event log error (source: "VSS") when the gigabyte limit is reached, so you'd want also to limit the number of "checkpoints" or "restore points" or Vol Shadow copies for this or that drive. So with a small system disk, you could allow for more restore points; for the remainder, probably fewer and with less risk. My guess is that you might even limit the making of shadow copies to the occasional backup operation.

Or I think that's what you -- or maybe the tech rep -- was trying to say. In any case, I'll sort this out, since it's all working fine otherwise.

 

[Dahak]

Here is the command line that you may be looking for do move the shadows from you c: to say g which would be your usb drive for example

vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=c: /on=g: /maxsize=4000mb

What this will do is any of the shadow copies created for drive c: it will store them on drive g with a max size of 4GB

More details here,
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754968.aspx

For some reason I cannot find the command to limit the amount of shadows. I was sure you could cause I was running into space issues with it at a customers location

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Here is the command line that you may be looking for do move the shadows from you c: to say g which would be your usb drive for example

vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=c: /on=g: /maxsize=4000mb

What this will do is any of the shadow copies created for drive c: it will store them on drive g with a max size of 4GB

More details here,
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754968.aspx

For some reason I cannot find the command to limit the amount of shadows. I was sure you could cause I was running into space issues with it at a customers location

I'd say the ability to do that makes it possible to really tune up the system. While it's nice to have rollback points or restore-points for the system-boot drive, you'd think you wouldn't want a lot of volume shadow copies for the data drives -- just enough to restore from a mishap, such as erasing a file or folder by mistake.

And I'm turning this idea of using a large USB3 flash drive over in my mind. I'd even think a very large USB2 drive would do the trick. Shadow copies don't take a great deal of time to create. Couldn't really hurt anything: if something "isn't right," I'd simply clear all the shadow copies for each drive, disable them, and then reconfigure them when a different volume is determined for storing them.

I think I've overturned some of the wisdom I've heard from our colleagues here -- first about my main SB-K workstation, it's obscure hardware problems and nothing owing to the OC settings; second -- using this old 680i "NVidia" motherboard with its clunky SATA-II nForce controller for the server. I have now got all my hardware drivers updated, with all the event log errors and warnings eliminated insofar as they derived from those issues.

I had installed a new network controller to replace the NVidia, which I disabled in BIOS. There had been four errors -- ending with "unable to establish HomeGroup connection" which depended on "Function Discovery Resource Publication" service, which apparently depended on "System initialization service" which was timing out. All these things eventually were restarted automatically, but it all traced to a warning at boot-time about the new controller: "Intel Desktop Network Controller is disconnected." In device manager, I went into the network controller's property pages, raised the "Advanced" tab and discovered an item "Wait for Connection" was disabled. Enabling it eliminated all the other errors!

Now I just have to refine my backup strategy for these drives and folders, and pick some hot-swap backup drives destined to hold just so much data.