> 
> We have been running Bacula on Windows with VSS disabled, but would
like
> to turn it on for disaster recovery purposes.  In our tests on a fully
patched
> version of Windows Server 2003, we are running into a problem where
files
> that can be backed up without VSS are being reported as "corrupted or
> unreadable" when VSS is enabled.  I posted a sample log to
> http://pastebin.com/NRYgmRQy
> 
> This does appear to be a Windows VSS problem rather than an issue with
the
> Bacula client, as the system logs report an ntfs error when it occurs.
A chkdsk
> did not help.
> 

Are there any other messages in the event logs about the vss snapshot
process?

What you describe would indicate that the problem is Windows rather than
Bacula. Can you try the following suggestions, in no particular order:

While the backup is running, does the command 'vssadmin list writers'
show any writers with errors? The way Bacula uses VSS is fairly
simplistic and doesn't involve the writers, but it does give a 'crash
consistent' copy of the drive. A writer in an error status would be an
indication of a problem though.

Is the MySQL very heavily used? VSS likes to try and find a period of
'idle time' to do its work. Whatever happens, the outcome should never
be a corrupt snapshot but maybe you've discovered a bug. Is it possible
to make MySQL idle (or stop it altogether but ideally you'd test with
the files still in use) and see if the problem persists?

Do a chkdsk /f on the drive where the database is. Probably best to do
it on reboot rather than force a dismount of the drive. Obviously the
volume is working well enough but there could be some latent corruption
or something that only comes out in the snapshot.

Create a snapshot manually. This guy blogs about how to do it
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2005/01/20/357836.aspx and map
it to a drive letter. The vshadow tool that he talks about is part of
the VSS SDK... newer versions are available but I assume this version
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=2349
0 might do the trick on 2003. Once you've created the snapshot, see if
you can access the files just by copying them to somewhere else. At
least then you'll know if you have a general VSS problem or if it is
specific to Bacula.

Good luck!

James

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