Tech tips
Creating a Recovery CD
If you’ve recently purchased StorageCraft ShadowProtect for the first time, you may not know how to create a recovery CD. You’ll need a CD with the StorageCraft Recovery Environment in case you ever need to restore a system — whether it’s a server or a desktop/laptop. If you downloaded the software from the StorageCraft Web site, you received some instructions on how to do this, but you may not have understood why you need to do this now. Basically it boils down to this: if you wait until you need the recovery disk (say, following a catastrophic failure), it will be a little more difficult to create the CD. It’s always so much easier to have it handy before the disaster.
So here’s what to do. After downloading ShadowProtect, load a blank CD into your CD/DVD drive. Now navigate to the folder where you saved your ShadowProtect 4 download, unzip the file and you’ll see a .ISO image file. Open your CD burning software and then browse to the .ISO file and burn this to your CD. Once it’s burned, make sure you label it ShadowProtect Recovery CD and put it in a safe place.
Most CD burning software are able to create a CD from an .ISO file, but there are some free tools available to do this, too: ISOTool.exe is a tool included with ShadowProtect and Active @ISO Burner is a free tool you can download at: http://www.ntfs.com/iso_burner_free.htm.
Tech Tip: Exchange 2007 Hang Resolved
Editor’s Note: This tech tip comes from Nate, on our development team.
Several of our users were reporting that when they used ShadowProtect Server or SBS Edition on Server 2008 x64 with Exchange 2007, that even with all hotfixes applied their Exchange service (store.exe and the transport as well) would periodically hang at the start of a backup. The only way to recover from this state was a reboot. Not fun. We analyzed this issue and discovered that such hangs would occasionally occur with Exchange 2007 when *any* product uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to establish a volume snapshot.
After discovering that this issue could be reproduced with only Microsoft executables, we delivered the details of this issue to Microsoft Support, and happily they were able to find and fix this issue in short order. See KB968621 for more information on this particular issue. The fix for this issue is now available from Microsoft as part of Update Rollup 9 for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1. We encourage all users of ShadowProtect and Exchange 2007 to apply this Rollup 9 update.
Tech Tip: Recovering an Incomplete Image
Editor’s note: This tip comes from Nate, one of StorageCraft’s amazing software engineers.
Recently, one of our customers was taking a full backup when the server’s RAID array died, tragically before the backup itself was complete. The customer had no other backup of this server. He asked us if there was any way to gain access to the contents of this partially-complete backup. It turns out, there is.
When ShadowProtect is in the process of creating a backup image file, the image’s file name has a .tmp extension to indicate that the image file is not yet complete. Once complete, the image file is renamed to its final name (with a .spf or .spi extension). This .tmp file was all that the customer had to work with. We had him rename it to INCOMPLETE.SPF and then execute the following three commands from within the cmd.exe command line shell:
- cd “\Program Files\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect”
- set SP_REPAIR_MODE=yes
- sbrun -mdn ( sbset -c “D:\INCOMPLETE.SPF” : sbcrypt -50 : sbfile –wd “D:\COMPLETE.spf” )
The above command (which works on ShadowProtect 3.3+) takes the incomplete backup image file and from it generates a new, complete, backup image file. The new file is complete in the sense that it can be used with the restore and mount tools, even though it will be missing some data (as the backup image file from which it was generated was incomplete). The above commands assume that the files are in the root of the D: drive. If you’re performing these steps yourself, make sure you adjust the paths for your own scenario, and make sure that there are spaces before and after all of the colon ‘:’ and parentheses ‘(‘ ‘)’ characters. If you omit the spaces around these characters, then you’ll get a syntax error. Finally, if your image file was encrypted with a password, the third command (the sbrun command) will pause and wait for you to enter the image’s password before it continues.