Before backing up to cloud providers, such as Amazon S3, Glacier, Azure, OpenStack, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Google Drive, and Softlayer, you may want to look at alternatives. These services may turn out to be very costly if you don’t watch out and if you are not aware of all pitfalls set in your way to […]
When backing up a VM that runs SQL Server inside you may run into the following issue. The VM backup fails and the Event Viewer on the host reports a VSS writer inside the VM failed. Upon inspection of the VM’s Event Viewer and SQL Server’s logs you find: Error: 18210, Severity: 16 and Error […]
If you are stuck trying to back up or copy long path names over 240 characters long, you are not alone. Did you know Windows NTFS supports nested, long paths and folders reaching well over 32,000 characters? And, Windows Explorer itself will produce errors when you are trying to work with deep folders over […]
Microsoft uses an old but effective strategy of selling “interrelated components”. You want X to work? Then you need to buy A, B, C and spend a many work hours (and lots of dollars, too), only to find out: • Everything about A, B, and C before you understand how they work together • it doesn’t work: the […]
In this article we show possible fixes for Windows error 64 “The specified network name is no longer available”, which may pop up when large network I/O is performed and appears to affect only certain kinds of devices, for example, Linux-based NAS devices during lengthy backups. In the network adapter settings of the sending machine (or […]
What Causes VSS Shadows to Stick? Deleting orphaned Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) shadows may be necessary from time to time for several reasons. A: You are using defect backup software or some scripts that don't clean up correctly. In that case follow instructions below and switch to BackupChain®. B: Your backup software crashes all […]
Virtual machine backup software is a new class of disaster recovery tools and deserves special attention. While some products are all-in-one backup software solutions, such as BackupChain, other tools may be for virtual backup only. We put together a list of virtual machine guides and how-to tutorials for your convenience that describe how to backup […]
In this detailed article we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of external hard drives, connected via USB, eSATA, or Firewire. With the advent of USB 3, all modern PCs, servers, and laptops now offer a very simple interface for plugging in portable storage and as we summarize below, external hard drives are perfect for dozens […]
Bit rot is a very complex phenomenon. While most publications refer to hard drives and tapes, such as http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/ and http://www.economist.com/node/21553445 the reality is much worse because bit rot also affects RAM and CPUs. Damaged RAM can be quite difficult to spot, too. How Damaged RAM can interfere with your data and affect your […]
