Recently in Backups Category

I had a weird error on a rev drive backup which wouldn't let me do anything to the rev drive - I was unable to backup, catalog or do anything else useful with the drive. I was getting the error message "An error occured while processing a B2D command. Change: MoveMedium() Attempt to Lock Slot Failed (Path to file.lck); Error=112

If you enter "Attempt to Lock Slot Failed" you get no results back from Google or Veritas (thats not suprising on the latter) - the only thing similar states that the disk is full. In my case explorer shows 2.8mb free and it is set to overwrite in Backupexec anyway.

I'm not sure what I did to get it working in the end but the following 3 things seemed to do the trick when done at the same time.
1. Remove the drive and put it back in again.
2. Dragged the oldest file to the scratch media (this seems to solve a lot of BE problems)
3. Kicked off a backup job to restore a small file.

Hope this helps someone else.

nucleus data recovery's Kernel for BKF looks like a good way of recovering from a backup image that is unreadable with ntbackup. Fortunately I've not had to do this yet....
However I have had to use PC Inspector's File Recovery for digital camera cards and the other day I recommended it to a user whose disk full of ghost images were coming back as unreadable - until this utility was used. Well worth downloading if you have not used it already.

We're back! My site was closed sometime last week as the server it was hosted on was having resource issues. I was offered a move to a new server and unfortunately the flat web pages got moved across but the sql database backend didn't. It's now been fixed and we're live again. Expect a couple of posts from me as I catch up on my blogging from the past couple of days.
Now I'm off to ensure I have a REALLY good sql backup of my data - for some reason my control panel backup didn't include a valid copy of my mysql databases.

Kristen had an upsetting moment when she plugged in the XD card from the camera and saw the following



It looked like all the photos that she had taken today were corrupt and unreadable (and translated into chinese!). Fortunately I remembered reading about PC Inspector File recovery which I had tried out but not in a real life scenario. One download later and a search of the hard drive returned lots of image files stored on the disk (as expected). Recovering them was just a matter of selecting whereabouts I wanted to put the files (on a different disk). There were two options available. The first was using FAT1 and the second was to use FAT2. When I used FAT1 most of the files came back ok, but there were several files that came back slightly corrupted - this one is one of the worst


Some of the other photos have been uploaded to my Birdtable zoto gallery as Kristen took some excellent pictures of the birds on the birdtable today.

Lifehut has a good post on how to enable the automatic backup of Wordpress to an email system such as google. Worked great although I couldn't use the form of username+tag@gmail.com as the mail server that wordpress runs on does not allow + in the email address as strictly speaking its not rfc compliant. Yahoo groups also has this problem in that you can sign up for a mailing list with a + in the address but not use that address in their web interface.

STGViewer is a great utility for recovering individual files from the activesync backups that get created on your harddisk normally in the directory C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\ActiveSync\Profiles\pdaname

One of our servers suddenly stopped doing its backup properly. When I watch the (scheduled) backup routine running the selection that it backs up is not the selection that is listed in the .bks file. I'm not sure what it *is* backing up as the (full) log file doesn't tell me the details and the gui interface is not available for me to poke around on when the job is scheduled. Turns out that the @ in front of the backup selection (as per Microsoft's XP backup article) did the trick. Why I should need one in Windows2000, when it's not documented anywhere else that I can see, I don't know. I'm just glad the backups are all working again in time for the Christmas break. Our mail server was also refusing to backup, but this was because there was more data on the disk than would fit on the tape drives. Swine consultants keep backing up their hard disks using ghost or even just an xcopy onto the server and taking it over the tape drive capacity.
No flames telling me to use BackupExec or any other third party software please, unless you are going to give me a cheque to buy the third party software at the same time.