Sanders

I have a fairly new server running WSE2012R2. I have DrivePool 2.x latest version installed. One pool configured (F:) and it is made up of 4-4TB and 1-6TB HGST NAS drives all on my mobo's Intel controller. Boot device is a 256G SSD also on Intel and there is one other 1TB drive dedicated to system backups on a secondary Marvell onboard chip controller. No other disks although I do have a slim DVD installed on a add-on controller (Siig) 2-port SATAIII card. My system backups are configured to do daily backups of the C: (SSD) drive so I could recover with a bare metal recovery. In no way are any of the pool drives or the pool itself involved in nightly system backups. They do hold some of the relocated system folders (Client Backups mainly) but those are not backed up in the dailys. The backups are configured to run at 11:30pm and are set to be Microsoft's version of "incremental". However about every 2 weeks the backup routine actually does a full back up on the system partition and then does incrementals from that point on until it decides the next full backup is needed. Whenever that full backup happens, I always get several nondescript disk warning errors that I have traced back to the DrivePool drive. (F:). The errors (typically between 2-8 identical warnings) all occur at exactly the same time stamp in the Windows Logs right at the completion time of the backup. I assume it's basically finishing writing the ~24 gig backup files at that point and also creating the new volume for the backup set and/or clearing out old ones, which is what, I suspect, triggers the errors as the DrivePool service gets notified of a bunch of disk/volume changes. Anyway the error is: Level: Warning Source: disk Event ID: 51 Task Category: None Message: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk8\DR19 during a paging operation. Always 'Harddisk8' which maps to the DrivePool drive. The DR19 part does vary. When I look at the DrivePool logs I see these types of messages (Windows Logs has the 8 warnings at exactly time stamp 06:37:34Z): DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [Disks] Updating disks / volumes... 2015-04-08 06:37:32Z 721806531075 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeMissingDisk (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812554682 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812556450 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeReadOnly (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812557941 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812558843 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeNoMeasure (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812560300 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812561161 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [Disks] Got Volume_Depart (volume ID: a440ea48-264c-4018-a7f6-c8bad40ea5db, plex ID: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000, %: 0)... 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812637894 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [Disks] Got Disk_Depart (disk ID: 21bec784-9493-4ef2-91ca-d1cb1b4f8564)... 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812660975 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [Disks] Got Pack_Depart (pack ID: c5d4e5d9-a1e6-4348-b50b-8b9492eaaa1b)... 2015-04-08 06:37:34Z 721812663010 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [Disks] Updating disks / volumes... 2015-04-08 06:37:35Z 721815932045 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeMissingDisk (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817871986 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817873395 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeReadOnly (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817874499 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817875371 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Clear pool mode: PoolModeNoMeasure (key=PoolPartUpdate) 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817897265 DrivePool.Service.exe Information 0 [FsControl] Set overall pool mode: PoolModeNormal 2015-04-08 06:37:36Z 721817900386 The Event ID 51 disk error appears to be some generic MS warning message which is impossible to diagnose. The question is, is it something I should be concerned about and/or is it normal? It's entirely repeatable at every full backup but it's been happening for a few months now with no obvious bad effects. I can upload the entire DP log from 4/7/2015 if needed. It did a full backup last night. Thanks.

Christopher, Thank you very much for your answer. It got turned on for the pool by WSE whenever I relocated a System Folder using the Dashboard utilities. It basically forces you to go through and update Server Backup configuration each time a folder moves. I turned VSS back off which is what led to the troubles with the System Backup failing and then I eventually removed the entireset of system folders on the pool drive and the pool drive itself from System Backup. I assume that didn't hurt anything or damage the pool right? I assume you mean, "backup any folder in the pool"? I have no desire to backup the entire pool drive but from VSS' perspective it seems to be all-or-nothing. I think the latter solution would be best in this case and then just keep all the System Folders out of the System Backup completely. But I'm a little unclear about this and what effect it has on a System Restore. Really all I care about is being able to restore my server's SSD from bare metal in the event of a catastrophic failure of the SSD or the need to do a complete rebuild for some reason. What's the effect of relocating System Folders and then not backing some of them up? I have no use for "Company", for example, but I'll be damned if I can see a way to delete it. What I don't want to have happen is that a system restore fails because some unused "System Folder" isn't available after a restore because it's not in the backup set. As I said, I'm new to WSE so I'm not sure what some of these System Folders are for. All I really care about are the client backups of the default ones that got added at install. My WHSv1 uses about 200 GB with it's current strategy to back up 7 client PCs. Is this going to be roughly the same space requirement? I can afford to duplicate 200GB in the pool if that's the case. This one, I had considered. I do sync operations on my WHS pool with robocopy and some self-authored batch files. I back up the WHSv1 client backups ~monthly to a network share on another computer using the old "WHS BDBB" add-in. Something similar would probably work for me I just wasn't sure how/whether it could be restored as there's no mechanism from within WSE to restore a client backup database. If a WSE loses it's client backups off the pool (or some critcal db file is damaged), can one simply manually copy an older version from an offline HDD back into the pool in the correct system folder and then WSE just picks up again with a working client backup database from that point? I realize that some days worth of client backups might be lost in that case but that's hardly going to matter for my installation. Again, I appreciate the help.

Hi I'm in the process of setting up a new home server to replace an aging WHSv1. The new server is running WSE2012R2. I intended to just have a system drive, which is an SSD, another drive dedicated to just system backups and the rest (up to 9 more) would be 4- or 6-TB pool drives. I don't see any need for file duplication in the pool for anything. The files are mainly static media files and I do weekly sync operations using offline HDDs to pick up any additions. I'm running into an issue that may have more to do with not being familiar with WSE but I think preople here will know. I have read in the forums about some DrivePool and VSS/System Backup issues but it's still not clear to me how to handle this or what "best practice" is. So my WSE wants me to move default System Folders off Drive C:. Not a bad idea since the client backups will be too big for an SSD anyway. I don't think I have much use for most of these default system folders to begin with except the Client Backups. I want to locate them in the pool and then use System Backup to backup those that I care about (like maybe also the "User" system folder hierarchy) but I'm runing into issues with System Backup and VSS configuration when I do this. When I relocate a system folder, Server Backup wants me to add those in the new location to the backup plan, but to do this it needs VSS running on the entire pool volume. That seems like a bad idea to me. I tried switching off VSS for the pool drive but then system backups fail. So what is the strategy here that allows System Backup to take care of automatically backing up C:, plus the client backups, and maybe the User system folders nightly? Doesn't enabling VSS on a virtual drive cause trouble? I definitely don't want it making snapshots of all the media files that might come/go as well and wasting space on those. I read the forum threads here about adding folders directly from the drives in the pool to the backup but since the plan is to have a total of 8 pool drives that means I have to manage all of those individual subfolders on every drive since those system folders will be ditributed among all the pool drives. I guess I can relocate system folders to a nonpool drive and then back that up with System Backup with VSS enabled on that one drive, but I lose a bunch of pool space by doing that. It's highly unlikely I would need 4-TB just to handle client backups. What to do here? Thanks.