On Tue, 2011-11-08 at 10:17 +1100, James Harper wrote:
> 
> Are there any other messages in the event logs about the vss snapshot
> process?
> 

I didn't see anything else significant, but I will look again in a few
hours.

> 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.

Didn't notice any, but will retest.

> 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?

Most of our backups are of VMs, so we cloned a production machine for
our test and put it on its own VLAN.  With no outside traffic, the
database should be pretty quiet.  I do not have the DB password to
flush_tables_with_read_lock, but I should be able to stop the DB.

> 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.

Already tried this one.

> 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.

Definitely a promising approach.  I will let you know what I find.

> Good luck!
> 
> James

-- 
Regards,

Avery Ceo
Systems Administrator
Enterprise Hosting


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