Using FREENAS as remote NAS for Windows 7 backups

[Vinicius Brasil]

I have two machines currently running windows 7 profession and a FREENAS server running v8.04. I am currently trying to run windows backup to backup on to CIFS shares. The backups start but fail early on. I see that some folders have been written to the destination backup folders but nothing beyond that.

I am not sure if this is a windows 7 issue or a FREENAS issue.

My FREENAS box has 4 GB of RAM, and two 2 TB disks running RAID1 and a 2TB external drive plugged in via USB. I am attempting to run the back up to shares created on the 2TB external drive.

Not sure why this is not working or if there is documentation on how to set this up correctly, any help is much appreciated.

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm a little confused at what you said you are doing.

Do I understand that you are sharing from your external drive (Like CIFS/NFS)?

How is your external drive formatted?

Are copying file from it, or to it?

 

[cyberjock]

You really need to identify where the error is before you start trying to troubleshoot.

You should try to backup to a local drive first and see if that works. You should also check the event log to see what error it's outputing. There's too many possible causes for the error to even begin to troubleshoot at this point. Various possibilities include but are not limited to antivirus, firewalls, network problems, windows 7 OS issues, bad hard drive(or other hardware), etc.

Personally, I have backed up to a FreeNAS server with the windows 7 backup without issues before.

 

[Vinicius Brasil]

Sorry for the confusion, I myself am not entirely sure what I need. At this point I have an external HD connected to my FREENAS via USB that I want to use exculsively for backups. That drive is formated with NTFS and is configured as a CIFS share in FREENAS. I can access this drive from my windows 7 machines, I can copy files to it and delete the files. (I also have RAID set up for two drives that I intend to use for a media server on this machine, that is a seperate discussion.)

I tried to run windows back up to it and it seems to work but then confronted errors midway through and realized that it was a uphill battle trying to get this to work. Ideally if this worked it would be the cleanest solution for what I am looking for but I understand that windows can do some wierd sh*t and their error reporting is very ambiguous at times so I really don't want to go into what the possibilities are here, unless of course others have been able to do this successfully and can show me how.

What my goal is, is to back up my windows 7 machines? I can use Rsync via Deltacopy and back up some files which is great. I currently have this setup and have successfully backed up my music and photos folders. However, I want to save an image of my windows 7 devices and have that backed up on FREENAS as well, that way I don't have to spend hours reinstalling software in the event of a HD crash.

So I have been looking on the web for some third party software, but most of the stuff I find is terrible and I really don't want to spend more than $50money on any enterprise level stuff, but want a good solid solution. I am sure there are people in the forum that can provide me some good tips. BTW, I am going to install FREENAS 8.2.

 

[ProtoSD]

Sharing an NTFS drive, much less over USB, is not supported. NTFS support is intended to import data to a FreeNAS native filesystem such as UFS or ZFS. This is definitely not a good solid solution. If you want to do a reliable backup, this is not the proper way to do it. Do some more reasearch or see what other solutions people here can suggest.

 

[Vinicius Brasil]

I stand corrected, the external USB drive is configured as a FreeNAS ZFS 'Volume. Within that volume I have configured a ZFS dataset and I am trying to backup to that dataset. So the filesystem is fine, is it ok that it is an external USB drive as opposed to an internal SATA drive?

 

[cyberjock]

It's not recommended.