Hi guys,

Does anyone have any experience of using external hard drives as backup devices?

We have a good handful of customers who do this and we often have intermittent problems with them - ie everything is working fine and then the drive disappears from my computer and the backups fail because there is no F: drive (or whatever).

The drive is still listed in Device Manager and Disk Management says that the disk is not initialised. You can go through the initialisation but you still cannot access it. You can even create a new partition and format it and it will eventually come back with Logical Disk Manager "The request timed out and could not be completed". Rebooting makes no difference and sometimes physically disconnecting the drive, turning it off/on and then reconnecting makes it work.

Other times, the ext HDD just dies.

We have used Lacie and Iomega ext HDDs. The servers have been Dell PE 840s and PE 1800s.

I really cannot recommend ext HDDs due to the problems that we have seen. Tapes also have their problems but they usually just bad tapes or need cleaning more often.

Has anyone got any other experiences?

Thanks

Ivan

Hi Ivan,
Are these permanently connected or are they connected/disconnected regularly? If they are disconnected how are they disconnected?
What is the USB device in the Dells?
Have you tried a dedicated USB expansion board?
Thank you,
David

Hi David,

Some are used in a weekly rotation (online for a week and then taken offsite) and others are just left connected - all pretty random. As for disconnecting, I would say that the USB cable is pulled out rather than the proper method of stopping first. In any case, the HDD would be working away and then just stop! I was thinking of trying an ext USB hub but it seems more of a problem with the drives than with the USB/server.

Of course, we usually recommend tape backup and always keeping at least 1 backup offsite but sometimes the customer is swayed by 300GB of backup for €200.

Is there anyone out there that regularly recommends ext HDDs as a backup device?

Thanks

Ivan

Hi Ivan,
I remember Microsoft had a tool taht you could script a drive to be safe for removal. If the user was removing the drive on a daily basis I would recommend using it, I just can not find the info at this moment I'll post abck when I do.
Have you checked that you have the latest drivers for the USB Hub on the motherboard?
If the issue persists I would put in a PCI UB card and plug the drive into that, rather than the Onboard USB ports. Again with the latest drivers.
Hope this helps,
David

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the info on DEVCON you gave me offline, I was able to incorporate it into my backup script.

For everyone else, here is how you can use DEVCON (from MS) to remove USB Mass Storage Devices.

1) Numerate all devices:

devcon find usb\*|find "USB Mass Storage Device">%temp%\devices.txt

2) Delete them:
if exist %temp%\devices.txt For /F "tokens=1" %%i in (%temp%\devices.txt) DO DEVCON REMOVE "@%%i"|del %temp%\devices.txt

Handy if you want to backup some folders and then to eject the USB HDD. To find the USB HDD again:

devcon rescan

It is probably not perfect but it should help my situation and reduce the potential of corruption.

Cheers

Ivan

Yeah use external HDD's regulalry for backups. Strangely have found Lacie the most un-reliable. It's a struggle to get XP recognise them at times mainly because the drive does not power up with XP as it should do.

Slightly off topic, but just picked up the new Zyxel NAS box, have to say it is great little unit, I got it just for backin up to, for servers and workstations. So far so good.
David

Quesiton for those that use External HDDs, how do you partition the drives?
The reason I ask is that i have had issues with HP servers trying to reboot with an EX HDD that has been partition with a Primary partition rather than an extended partition.
Thanks,
David

Guess what the problem with the Lacie's was?

A dodgy AC adapter.... aghhhhh.

How have you found the Lacie drives?
I was given one of their ED Minis, thank you Alex, but have had some issues with it registering the wrong IP address in WINS, but using just an IP address they have had some great throughput for backing up across the network.
One other thing that might of interest to those using Zyxel NSA 2400 devices, the last firmware release 2.11 to fix issues with Vista compatability has caused some issues with RAID configurations, that is to be fixed in 2.12 that is due for release in the next day or two.
HTH
David

I can't really vouch for any particular brand but last week I was reading with extreme interest the discussions on backup in Cougar where tapes are no more....

I am pretty fond of tape (especially those fast and cheap LTO2 drives) but I'll have to rethink my strategy on external HDDs again.

Something to ponder over a few mince pies <img src='desktopmodules/ntforums/images/emoticons/biggrin.gif' height='20' width='20' border='0' title='Big Grin' align='absmiddle'>

-Ivan