I have been using Symantec’s Veritas Backup Exec to backup files on my network. Additionally, I am not using tapes, I use external hard disk drives as rotating media for my backup schedule. My server runs on Windows 2008 Server R2.
Up until recently, I was using Backup Exec 12.5 and three 500GB Buffallo external drives and had no problems. About a month ago, I replaced the Buffallo hard disks with three Samsung 1.5TB ones and I also decided to upgrade to Backup Exec 2010.
Anyhow, I installed Backup Exec almost a month ago and the backups have been running OK since. I mean, there were no error or failed jobs in the job history log, so yes, I thought everything did run OK. That was until I had to recover a mailbox for an employee.
The recovery wizard showed that there were no backups for the mailbox store for almost a month. I tried everything I could think of but the backups wouldn’t show up.
I informed the user that I couldn’t get data before that time and focused on troubleshooting the problem. What I did first was to recreate the job and test it and that’s were the problem showed up. When I recreated the job and tried to run it again, the job stopped exactly when it was about to reach the first 4GB of backed up data.
The reason was simple. My media size, in Backup Exec, was 4GB but my external hard drives were formatted as FAT32 (they come like that from the factory). FAT32 doesn’t support files that big and that’s why my newly created backup failed.
This made me think though, why the rest of the backups didn’t fail all this time. Well they did fail, but Backup Exec wouldn’t show them as failing. It’s maybe a bug or something, maybe because I upgraded from a previous version without recreating the jobs, I don’t know why.
What I did was to convert my FAT32 disks to NTFS by following this tutorial http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881 and everything was resolved. Backups run successfully now and I can recover data just fine.
Just a heads up, don’t trust that your data is backed up without testing a recovery scenario. I don’t want to know what would happen if I found out that my data is not backed up, on a disaster recovery situation. Imagine the whole network going down and me not having backups. I don’t even want to think about it…









