Why is Retrospect not backing up some pretty important files?

[pchinn]

Long story short, one our clients had a major fire that did half a million in damage to their building and seriously hurt their servers. All but one of the servers would come back up after some cajoling (we're virtualizing them after we get some new hardware) but one would not.

 

Fortunately, we had a backup of this server and restored it to another server. We just wanted it running long enough that we can get a snapshot and virtualize it.

 

When we booted it up, we got several errors that services were not running. As we examined the event logs we discovered that IIS was not running because inetinfo.exe was not there and that SQL was not running because sqlserver.exe did not exist on this box. Both of these (particularly SQL) are extremely valuable services for this box. We checked the snapshot we restored from only to discover that these files were missing from the snapshot. Older snapshots had these files, although some did not. We have Retrospect configured to do a full backup of everything every night.

 

Why are these files missing from our snapshot? Fortunately in our case we were able to restore them from older backups and get the services we needed up and running, but it makes us wonder what other files we may be missing and may not be aware of yet. What would cause Retrospect to do this?

[MRIS]

Q. what are you backing up to? Disks or tapes? or D2D2T?

 

I am suspecting user error. Consider this scenario to see if it applies to you:

 

1. you simply do normal backups to tapes, using a new tape each day.

2. at the end of the week/month you simply erase the oldest tape and then use it again.

[pchinn]

We back up to disks. We have two hot-swappable disks that we use. Our policy is to let Retrospect groom automatically according to it's defined policy. We use 1.5 tb drives so we have 3 tb of backup data laying around. Generally speaking if we have to wipe a disk it's a disk full of older backups.

[G-Funk]

 

I have the same thing going on, and I'm about to post my own thread on this as well, including some screen shots.

 

I think it relates to what you've selected to backup in your script(s). If you use the wizard mode for creating a script and select to backup all file types (movies, music, etc, etc, etc) you're .exe files will get backed up.

 

But (even within the wizard) if you opt to de-select even one choice, say movies, or music, or pictures - .exe files as well as .bat, .dll, and so on do not get backed up. :confused2:

 

As I said I will be posting my own thread shortly on this ...... but in your case, if your SQL server just has SQL on it, and not a bunch of "fluff" type files I would just change what you're backing up to "All files"

 

You may have to switch from advanced mode to wizard mode to accomplish this ......

 

G.