ntbackup problem on Serv2003 with MDaemon installed

africates

Hi guys,

I have an issue with ntbackup on Windows 2003 Server. I have there few disks (system drive, mail storage drive for MDaemon mail server and drive designated for Archive Server for MDaemon (sql database). I have shadow copies turned on, and they are configured to do the copies on separate USB HDD connected to the server.

I've configured nt backup to back up my 3 drives and system state to USB HDD as follow: Normal backup - Friday, Incremental backup - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I have separate files for all of them so my turnaround is one week. The issue is that after running backup (usually fridays backup) the operation is very long and I can see, this is when ntbackup is trying to backup .msg files. It can be even half an hour on one .msg file (we have thousands of messages). Sometimes the backup is finished properly, but usually is not, even after 2,5 days (monday morning). I can see only 'grey backup windows' and i can not even kill the process. Any ideas how to avoid this issue?

Thanks
Afri

ressem

Can you run sysinternal's Filemon to get an idea as to whether operations are failing as ntbackup tries to read?

Is the drive connected to a USB 2 or USB 1.1 port on the server? Windows 2003 can behave appallingly if you connect a large NTFS drive using USB 1.1.

africates

Hi Ressem.
Thanks for your reply. The issue in rather not connected to the USB HDD because I was trying to do the backup on internal drive as well. I can not run process manager now because i still can not close hanged 'backup windows' (i run it yesterday evening). I'll run it and let you know about results.

The other thing is that i run system state backup yesterday and it went ok. As far as I can see now the problem is with D drive where i store mail messages.... but we will see when I run Process Manager.

thanks
afri

ressem

Can you connect to the server using Remote desktop, to bypass the stalled backup windows/ shut down using terminal services manager?

It's not just when writing to the USB 1.1 backup that will feck up explorer. As USB 1.1 is slow and cannot read and write simultaneously, even the normal browsing + NTFS checks and indexing can cause long stalls with USB drives in the 100's of gigabytes. Might be worth disconnecting it to see if backups work more reliably when it's off.

Filemon is different to process monitor. It logs file accesses and the results of the disk accesses that they attempt and time taken.

africates

thanks Ressem,

I was trying without USB HDD and it was the same. I've tried with process monitor and everything crashed on some stage Today (process monitor and also mdaemon mail server ;/). I'll try with Filemon tommorow but i thought that Process Monitor is like filemon _ some extra posibilities (i turned on only file system scan on Process Monitor). Would it be better to start looking for other backup software (maybee something which will work properly with thousands of mails )

cheers
afri

ressem

i thought that Process Monitor is like filemon _ some extra posibilities (i turned on only file system scan on Process Monitor)

You're right, I'm wrong. Filemon doesn't log to the pagefile as much, so it might be more reliable if the hard disks are having issues.

NTbackup shouldn't have an issue with a few hundred thousand files though. There's an antivirus on the system I guess. Anything else?

If you manually copy the problem message files to another partition do they also take a while? In Procmon/filemon is there another process interspersing itself between reads and writes of explorer?

africates

There is MDaemon Mail Server, SecurityPlus for MDaemon (mail antivirus), Archive Server for MDaemon (archiving continously to sql database), F-Prot Antivirus (server), WSUS (temporary - for now this is only one server which I can use in DMZ), NTP Server.

I haven't moved message files so I don't know what would happen (I'll try). I saw few message files which were causing the delay but ntbackup didn't hang on them. I can not look at processing at all time so I don't know in which point the backup hanged. Everything crashed and I don't have any log from Process Monitor (can i set up it to save log continously rather than at the and of watching?).

I feel like I don't understand your last question... but I monitored only process: ntbackup.exe (there are thousands of processing files - MDaemon receive the messages and process them continously + spam traps etc. so i thought that the best is to monitore only ntbackup.exe)

One more thing is that I got warning about Virtual Memory but I increased it.

Thanks for your time,
afri

africates

Hi,

I got confirmation that ntbackup will not backup the MDaemon files correctly when the service is running. I don't want to turn it off each time for backup (even from script) so I'm gonna try Acronis (which is recommended by MDaemon support guys). I let you know about results...

thanks
afri

africates

Hi,

Acronis is working perfect for us! It took 30 minutes to do the whole system image (about 80GB in result). The one disadvantage is.... money

Take care
aFri