Windows Backup over CIFS

[Ethan Lewis]

I've been running FreeNAS for about a year and a half now, I had an 8.3.1 box that was working well, I was mainly using it as a backup target for a handful of Windows machines (some XP, some Win 7 pro, a couple of Win 8 pro...a real motley crew of desktops) using the regular Windows backup utility. Nothing flashy, but it worked, scheduled backups worked 95% of the time or so.

So, I just tried building it on a bigger, better system with a faster processor (Intel i7 870) and more ram (16gb), FreeNAS 9.1.1. 3 3tb drives in RaidZ. Everything seems good (I can connect to the share I created and move small files to it with no problems), but my first few attempts to back up to it have failed, returning error 0x807800C5. I've done some googling about that error message, some windows support forums suggested running SFC, which I did, returning no errors. At this point I'm trying to figure out if the problem is on the FreeNAS side or the Windows side...the fact that it worked before would seem to suggest FreeNAS but I'm researching both at the moment.

Here's a screenshot from my CIFS configuration page.

smbd and nmbd logs aren't turning up any useful information, I will turn up the logging level to see what I can find out. Are there any other things I should check?

 

[cyberjock]

Well, if you go to the file share can you create and delete files on the share?

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Yes, I can create and delete files on the share, I tried transferring a few 4 gig ISO files and it went through without a hiccup. I backed up one of my machines to an external HDD and I'm going to try copying that existing backup to the share. Windows is being wonky about file permissions for that backup set, but the issue doesn't seem to be with the size of the transfer itself.

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Update:
Still haven't resolved the issue, although indications seem to be that it's something Windows 8 related. I've tried and succeeded with several XP and Win 7 hosts and they all went through without a hitch. I tried creating a completely unsecured share with anonymous login and full read-write permissions for everyone (777), and it still failed with the same error message.

What do I have left to try (other than getting acronis or something for my win8 hosts)?

 

[cyberjock]

If it works on XP and 7, I guess go with Acronis or some other alternative.

Just another example why I'm bailing on MS products....

 

[pirateghost]

What are you using to backup your Windows 8 machines?

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Pirateghost - I'm using Microsoft's built in backup utility - called Windows 7 File Recovery in Win8. Not anything advanced or flashy, but it worked. Until now.

It looks like where it's running into the problem is while it's trying to create a system image - backup of user files without the system image goes fine. I've also heard anecdotally that Macrium/Paragon/etc users have also had problems doing windows 8 system image backups to a network target.

The situation I'm in is that Windows 8 has been kinda forced on me (management directive to issue tablet devices + legacy applications that require windows = fun times for all). My first reaction was KILL IT, KILL IT WITH FIRE, KILL IT BEFORE IT LAYS EGGS. I gradually made grudging peace with it (using it in desktop mode and ignoring the new features as much as possible), but then things like this come up. I could always set my win8 machines to do just a file backup and clonezilla them once in a while, but that's a manual process, and one of the nice things about the windows utility is that it happened automatically. Not quite set-and-forget, but all I had to do was check to verify that the scheduled backups were succeeding and now I'm looking at having to either (a) buy something new or (b) walk around with an external HDD in my pocket again, and I had hoped those days were in my past.

 

[pirateghost]

You should look into something other than Windows 7 system image. That option has been removed in 8.1. I use the built in 'File History' option in 8.1 on my client, but I use a USB drive. I will do some testing with over the network later and see what I can come up with.

 

[cyberjock]

I will warn you I've had horrid luck trying to do backups over the LAN that were totally automated.

I had used Acronis True Image for years, but it would suddenly start failing for no reason I could find with weird error codes. Consulting their "forums" the answer was "don't backup over the LAN". WTF kind of workaround is that!?

Then I did a trial of O&O DiskImage Pro(the home version doesn't support LAN backups). Worked great for the trial. Bought a license and my desktop randomly stops backing up. Same results. Looking at my desktop report log I've got lots of failed backups.. they all say "Unsuccessful: {Wrong Type}There is a mismatch between the type of object required by the requeested operation and the type of object that is specified in the request. 0xC0000024" If you go to their support they say to delete the job and recreate it as the job file must be corrupted. So I recreate the scheduled job and it might work and it might not. If it does, then great. But when the next scheduled task comes you have a 50/50 chance of it failing. Eventually, once it fails once it'll never complete. It actually doesn't even get to the part where it contacts the FN server for the backup. It fails after 4 seconds with no network connection opened. No clue what is wrong or how to fix it.

The machines that had problems with Acronis are not the same machines that fail with O&O Diskimage Pro. I've pretty much given up on backing up Windows machines automatically now.

If anyone has any suggestions for doing backups that work properly I'm all ears.

 

[Dusan]

If anyone has any suggestions for doing backups that work properly I'm all ears.

rsync (cygwin build, it's just one .exe and four .dlls). I use the Windows task scheduler to run it daily. Rsync sends the data to a snapshotted dataset via FreeNAS rsync module. It's rsync so only deltas are sent, snapshots ensure that I can go back in time. I actually share the dataset back via CIFS (a read-only share) and the samba shadow copy functionality allows me to restore any previous version quickly.
100% open source components that I can easily troubleshoot (but didn't have to so far), no closed black boxes to throw strange errors.
The only drawback is that it can't backup open files (e.g. outlook mailbox). I found an old patch that adds VSS support to cygwin rsync, but I did not try to integrate it into current rsync yet.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, I was looking at more of an image software so I just restore the image and it's bootable and ready to go...

rsync isn't a good option(IMO) because it can't handle open files. Windows is notorious for opening every file it can get its grubby hands on.

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Yeah, I've been told many times that LAN backups basically want to fail and will do so if you take your eyes off them for a second. I was actually pretty surprised at how well my previous setup worked. There were some failures early on but it got into a groove they were doing really, really well. Not what I would call "enterprise grade" (whatever that means) but it was good enough for my environment, and saved the day on a couple of occasions.

Not sure if rsync really would meet my requirements, although it's nice to know that rsync for windows does exist, because there's lots of other applications I could think of for that, just not for backing up a running OS drive.

Anybody here have experience in really large windows shops? Do these kind of things work better when backing up to a windows server instead of a linux/unix box?

Anyway, this thread is kind of meandering to non-freenas stuff (although if anybody can recommend a windows based backup client that plays nicely with freenas I am EXTREMELY interested). For now, I'm trying to do an image backup to a different target (a basic Win XP machine), mostly as a proof of concept to try and see if I can prove it's something FreeNAS related and not just "windows backup utility sucks". Because it did work before. I swear.

 

[cyberjock]

Anybody here have experience in really large windows shops? Do these kind of things work better when backing up to a windows server instead of a linux/unix box?

Actually, all of my tests failed just as much on a linux/unix server as a Windows Server. I'd "expect" that to be the case since CIFS should be CIFS and the server's OS shouldn't matter.

Well, when I worked at a location with 900 machines, about 50 of them were backed up by Norton Ghost years ago. If I remember correctly it had a Norton Ghost partition that was like 100MB that would bootup and get a list of tasks to run(and would do a backup or restore as dictated by the server). So those 50 machines were left on 24x7 and we setup a Ghost Server to trigger a backup at 12:50am. Then we had a script that would send a signal to all 50 workstations to reboot at 1 minute intervals between machines and as each one rebooted Ghost would do its image since a backup was "due". If there was no task to run on bootup(for example, if someone rebooted their server at lunch) then there would be no backup due, so it would just take a few additional seconds for the desktop to bootup. It was freakin' amazing for its time!

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Yeah...a setup like that would be nice. I worked at a place that used Symantec Backup Exec, I don't know particulars because I wasn't in the IT department back then but they spoke very highly of it. And then they switched to a Barracuda Networks appliance which they liked even better.

My situation is kind of a double-whammy of low budget and rapidly rising expectations. When I started the job, nobody was backed up at all except for our GM (who was using a consumer USB HDD). So I took a used desktop, put some more ram in it and a few cheap hard drives and that was my first freenas box. Ugly, yes, but compared to having no backup it was great. Backup appliances like Barracuda, EMC, etc...all very nice, but their starting price is slightly larger than my entire hardware budget for the year.

In other news, it looks like I'm going to be reconfiguring this box anyway because I just did some research and found out that my CPU doesn't support ECC ram. So much for reusing hardware. So I'm going back to UFS until I have the time to build this thing up right.

BTW, thanks Cyberjock for being such a crusader for getting the message out about ECC/ZFS, the dangers of raidZ1, etc. It's better I find this out before I've lost everything.

 

[cyberjock]

If it's just a CPU issue you can just drop one in. Not sure what your plans are but you can probably get one for cheap that will work. Don't need a $250+ CPU to be happy with FreeNAS' performance.

Now I feel like a man on a mission.. gonna see if you can automate Clonezilla backups somehow. If not, what backup solutions do appear to be reliable...

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Original CPU is an Intel i7 870, which uses a LGA1156 socket. Least expensive option I see in ARK that supports ECC is Xeon X3430. They go for about $75 used on ebay (except I'm specifically forbidden from using my purchase card for ebay purchases). New they go for $300+, and at that price I could get a whole refurbed Dell or HP server.

So there's limits to what a person can do with repurposed desktop hardware. I'm probably going to do a new build.

And let me know what you find out with automated clonezilla backups. Because with some tweaking that could be perfect...

 

[cyberjock]

What motherboard do you have?

 

[Ethan Lewis]

Motherboard is a Microstar MS-7613 http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&docname=c02014355#N155

The computer I'm using was a fairly nice business desktop, I maxed out the ram and put 3 3tb drives in it. I was originally thinking raid5/raidZ1 but given what I know now...what do you recommend doing with a 3-drive system, incidentally? Having 2 of them and doing some kind of duplication/replication?

Here's a monkey wrench concerning the original post: My test backup to the XP machine worked. So Windows 8 image backup CAN work over CIFS. What do you imagine might be failing in this particular instance?

 

[Ethan Lewis]

I detached my ZFS volume (due to lack of ECC ram), combined the same drives into a UFS volume. I reconfigured cifs and recreated my share from the ground up. Tried to back up to it, failed again, same error.
Here's my current smb.conf

Anyway, let me know if anything jumps out at you as being out of place.

 

[titan_rw]

I have Acronis True Image Home, and don't have any problems backing up to a network share.

Sometimes the linux based restore media seems to have problems authenticating against network shares, but backup has always worked.

A few times over the years I've had to revert to a backup that was automatically done at 2am or whatever.