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So, my existing backup solution is as follows:

I have a 4TB RAIDZ1 array (3x2TB disks) on a FreeNAS box tucked into my closet. I store all my music, recorded TV (script moves it here nightly), and other shared media on this box. I also run my backups to this drive. Backups for my main desktop run as a weekly snapshot-style backup of documents, etc. (most of my data drive), as well as a monthly image backup of my SSD.

But here comes trouble: I recently decided I wanted to try to recover an old version of a file as I had accidentally made changes I didn't want. That was okay, I should have the shadow copies going back about 2 years. So I figured up Windows Backup & Restore and went to open up the backup file for the machine that file was on...and nothing. Windows Backup & Restore fails to recognize the file (which, despite when navigating to the folder in Windows, shows the little 'Windows Backup' icon) as a backup image. Interestingly enough, if I open the backup via 7zip, there are half a zillion little zip archives in there, each containing some subset of the set of all data that was backed up. After several hours of drifting through these .zip files I did manage to restore the file! Yay!

But honestly, this just won't do. I'm betting this has to do with the fact that the backups are stored in a ZFS pool, that, despite being shared out via CIFS, Windows disagrees with somehow. So, I've been trying to figure out an alternative solution. I turned off all the backups, and started running a little .7z backup occasionally, but this just feels clunky, and I would really like to get back to having a full image backup of C:\ in case of emergency.

Macrium Reflect gets a lot of talk around these parts...has anyone had trouble restoring from a backup stored on a ZFS pool? Obviously everyone seems to like their imaging and other features, and it does have support for incremental backups if you buy it, but if I'm going to run into the same problem in the end, I may need to look at other options.

Any objections to Crashplan? https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

The free version lets you do daily backups to any computer (including friends). You can pay them for moderately expensive cloud backup. Or have a look at this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=100277

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

Any objections to Crashplan? https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

The free version lets you do daily backups to any computer (including friends). You can pay them for moderately expensive cloud backup. Or have a look at this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=100277

I have thought about doing a cloud-based backup solution, however, a couple of things prevent me from seriously considering it:

1) I have a 1Mbps upload speed (15/1...seriously TWC?) that makes it impossible to use this effectively

2) I'm not crazy about the idea of "someone else" technically owning my data.

And mostly, it's the first that's stopping me. I actually tried using my Google drive, by attempting to upload a 12GB "Essential backup" (documents, pictures, etc.) highly compressed .7z. The wait was just too ridiculous.

Figures that Windows would back up to it without complaint, but not let you restore.

Is it mapped as a drive letter, or are you using UNC paths? Might be worth trying whichever method you *didn't* try before (unless you've already tried both).

My guess is that it is some sort of weird permissions issue. Maybe Windows is trying to access the backup file as a user who doesn't have permission on the server?

CampinCarl wrote:

I have thought about doing a cloud-based backup solution, however, a couple of things prevent me from seriously considering it:

1) I have a 1Mbps upload speed (15/1...seriously TWC?) that makes it impossible to use this effectively

2) I'm not crazy about the idea of "someone else" technically owning my data.

And mostly, it's the first that's stopping me. I actually tried using my Google drive, by attempting to upload a 12GB "Essential backup" (documents, pictures, etc.) highly compressed .7z. The wait was just too ridiculous.

Er... if you read either my post or the website you'll find it stores encrypted backups to any target including your favorite home server for free. It's become a drop-in Windows Backup replacement for my family--I just back them up to my home server. I don't pay for Crashplan.

I do pay for OneDrive, though. Hard to say no to unlimited storage. But there's no built-in versioning so I did some Windows 8.1 File History trickery and now my 2Mbps connection will be crying for a month while it makes the initial versioned copy of OneDrive... on Onedrive! Muahaha.

That said, .7z backups seems very clunky. Are you backing up everything all at once? Maybe you can make use of ZFS's journaling instead?

Have you tried copying the backup files to another drive formatted in NTFS and restoring from there to see if the file system type is really your issue?

just brew it! wrote:

Figures that Windows would back up to it without complaint, but not let you restore.

Is it mapped as a drive letter, or are you using UNC paths? Might be worth trying whichever method you *didn't* try before (unless you've already tried both).

My guess is that it is some sort of weird permissions issue. Maybe Windows is trying to access the backup file as a user who doesn't have permission on the server?

Yeah it's mapped by default but I had tried just navigating to it (actually with IP rather than the hostname), didn't improve anything. The user thing could be a problem, but the mount permissions are 777, so it shouldn't be?

LoneWolf15 wrote:

Have you tried copying the backup files to another drive formatted in NTFS and restoring from there to see if the file system type is really your issue?

Sadly, I don't actually have a drive big enough to fit the backup for that drive anymore; it was a pretty long-running backup, and is about ~900GB in size at this point.

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

Er... if you read either my post or the website you'll find it stores encrypted backups to any target including your favorite home server for free. It's become a drop-in Windows Backup replacement for my family--I just back them up to my home server. I don't pay for Crashplan.

Errrrrr apparently my reading skills aren't what they used to be. I actually read that as "from any computer". Whoops! But I suppose I must ask--is your home server you're backing up to mounting its storage via ZFS or something else? My concern with Crashplan would be the same as Macrium; if they end up also not being able to restore for some (unknown to me) reason because the backup is stored on a ZFS pool rather than an NTFS drive, it wouldn't really get me anywhere.

CampinCarl wrote:

Yeah it's mapped by default but I had tried just navigating to it (actually with IP rather than the hostname), didn't improve anything. The user thing could be a problem, but the mount permissions are 777, so it shouldn't be?

Samba permissions mapping is a bit of a black art, and traditional *NIX "ugo" style file permissions don't map well to the Windows ACL model. I've seen a lot of weird behaviors over the years...

The Windows Backup utility in Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 (the latter through cli only) cannot do system image backups over the network to non-NTFS drives. System images are captured into VHD format to ensure ease of access (proprietary containers suck).

Using Windows Backup for file specific backups to alternative file systems should work. File backups as you've discovered use .zip as a container.

That being said I'd agree with what JBI said about Samba mapping of permissions causing you heartache. So in a manner of speaking, yes, the ZFS pool probably is making this harder than it should be.

CampinCarl wrote:

is your home server you're backing up to mounting its storage via ZFS or something else? My concern with Crashplan would be the same as Macrium; if they end up also not being able to restore for some (unknown to me) reason because the backup is stored on a ZFS pool rather than an NTFS drive, it wouldn't really get me anywhere.

It's backing up to an ReFS drive array in Windows 8.1 because I'm crazy. Crashplan was designed to be cross-platform so I doubt you'd have the same issues. Interestingly though, it takes advantage of each platform's journaling strengths when it can, so it'll use the Volume Shadow Copy service to back up files (which obviously is different than say, OSX).

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

CampinCarl wrote:

is your home server you're backing up to mounting its storage via ZFS or something else? My concern with Crashplan would be the same as Macrium; if they end up also not being able to restore for some (unknown to me) reason because the backup is stored on a ZFS pool rather than an NTFS drive, it wouldn't really get me anywhere.

It's backing up to an ReFS drive array in Windows 8.1 because I'm crazy. Crashplan was designed to be cross-platform so I doubt you'd have the same issues. Interestingly though, it takes advantage of each platform's journaling strengths when it can, so it'll use the Volume Shadow Copy service to back up files (which obviously is different than say, OSX).

I looked at Crashplan the other day, but is there any way to use it without creating an account? I want to keep this entirely local.

I don't see why the filesystem on the local box should interfere by way of its existence and design if the network translation layer is functioning as it should. It could be you have something improperly configured with whatever you're using there. Is that samba? So I'd look in that direction first.

https://ehelp.wiki.csupomona.edu/ZFS:_R ... _Windows_7

http://forums.nas4free.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=5109

Relevant?

I'd be interested to know what was wrong if you find out. I've had my own headaches with nfs, samba, linux and windows over the network.

Okay so I feel a weeeeeeeee bit silly.

Apparently, there's a great feature in Windows Backup and Restore. It will only find and 'understand' Backup Sets if they are in the root of the drive specified!

So, previously, I had mapped Z:\ to my freenas box\data\ and then navigated to the backups folder in the UI. See, it turns out, Microsoft is way too good for this! I have to mount freenas\data\backups directly, and then it works perfectly.

I clearly over thought this problem, but dear lord, who wrote this software?! Thanks for all your help guys!

Windows Backup is pretty bad, at least in Windows 7. I didn't use it because when Windows boots it needs to spend about 50 seconds with its thumb up its ass if you have a large HDD with a backup on it plugged in.

thanks for coming back and saying what it was.

CampinCarl - There are several things to backup, but yeah, having a network location needs to point the backup to the right directory. Agree, it is pretty silly, but it actually works well. That said I'm really glad you can use an UNC patch and not have to rely on mounted units.

I actually use the built in backup for one single good reason. Bare Metal Recovery Option. Included in that, you can chose to image the disk, in which case you get a new pristine fully working VHD copy made after your schedule. And since VHD's can be opened with 7-zip or several other programs, it's quite easy to find and take out files from that if you have the space.

Now, that said, I do have several tiers. I do weekly imaging on the workstation to VHD, as well as have a separate data folder backup that goes on an incremental schedule, but I tend to want to avoid that if I can. Because of the oddities like you had.

But then, I have most of my data on the fileserver on raid-5 set working from there over the network, so only installed programs and patching is what gets saved on the workstation. Then I filesync everything to a NAS as a pure sync copy with a program called FreeFileSync, that does exactly what it says. Pure and Simple Syncing.


That said, never had the problems that Melvar seems to have had, or seen anything like it either, not even when using an old USB sync as a backup drive.