Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m very lucky to be able to live in a country that has Civil Marriage for both same-sex and different sex couples. Some countries have only Civil Partnerships for same-sex couples, reserving Civil Marriage for different sex couples only.
Many people think that these are, for all practical purposes, the same. But they are not. In Ireland, for example, the differences can have real consequences.
The OK Go band + Pilobolus = Amazing Video.
Amazing indeed. My daughter will love it!
Sometimes I feel like Alice – I’m in a looking-glass world where black is portrayed as white, good is bad, or up is down. It’s at times like these when I’m likely to throw a Victor Meldrew fit at the apparent stupidity, cupidity or just plain bare-faced effrontery of those in charge, who have the power to dictate what we will experience in our daily lives.
What’s brought on this latest attack is the publication in yesterday’s Volkskrant newspaper of a two page spread covering the likely future of rail transport in the Netherlands.
The kernel of the report was the finding that breaking up the national rail network into separate chunks and putting services out to tender will reduce delays, according to research by network operator ProRail.
Let’s just savour that, shall we? And why would that proposition be true, in any meaning in the real world? Ah, we read, it’s because services will not be so interdependent, reducing the domino effect of delays, ProRail is quoting as saying.
Dear god in heaven, do these people not have two braincells to rub together?
Let’s just take a practical example. I want to travel from Amsterdam to my home – nearest station Varsseveld. That means that I’m using the Dutch National Railways (the NS) from Amsterdam until Arnhem, and then changing over to Syntus for the last hour from Arnhem to Varsseveld.
So excuse me, but surely for me, these services are interdependent – I want to step out at Arnhem and step onto a train bound for Varsseveld with the minimum of delay.
As a matter of fact, at the moment, Syntus (one of the independent rail operators that the Dutch Government is so in love with) offer what can only be described as a truly shitty service. I’ve lost count of the number of times that services have been delayed or cancelled, while the hapless train drivers run around like headless chickens, glued to their mobile phones receiving zero practical information.
On more than one occasion, I, together with my fellow travellers in the outer regions of Hell, have been herded from one platform to another in Zevenaar at the behest of the Syntus staff for what seemed like hours at a time. “The next train for Winterswijk will leave from platform 3”, “no, platform 4”, “no, that’s going back to Arnhem”, “Platform 1”, “no, we’re putting buses on” – so three train’s worth of passengers have to fight for seats on a single bus.
So, ProRail, don’t tell me that delays are not interdependent. Wherever they happen, they will have a domino effect on the individual traveller, if that traveller is where the delays are.
I note, with a roll of my eyes, that the ProRail research report was carried out at the request of the private rail operators. I can’t say I’m totally surprised at the findings then, although it only serves to underline the fact that we are indeed in looking-glass land.
And, oh joy, because of the love affair the Dutch Government have with the idea that more independent operators make for more efficiency, we have the situation to look forward to that if we want to travel from Amsterdam to Varsseveld, we will have not two, but three train operators to deal with: the NS, Breng and Syntus.
It’s at times like this when I earnestly wish to be face to face with the authors of these research reports and the faceless bureaucrats who decide our transport fate and slap them hard around the face with a wet fish.
If you were (or are!) using the original version of Microsoft’s Windows Home Server, you will probably have noticed that the WHS icon in the System tray changed colour to provide notifications at-a-glance:
If you’re now running Windows Home Server 2011, then the WHS icon (now the Launchpad icon) no longer shows this range of notifications. Basically, you now have a choice of one colour: green. Green now simply means that the Launchpad is running.
However, the Getting Started Guide for WHS 2011 still shows the WHS v1 colour notifications as being present in WHS 2011:
Not surprisingly, some people, reading this document, thought that they had found a bug, and reported it as such over at the Microsoft Connect web site (note: if you aren’t registered at this site, you won’t be able to see the actual bug report).
Microsoft did their “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” trick and replied that:
we decided in the 2011 release that backups should be seamless and not neccessarily [sic] notify the user of when they are in place
and said that it would not be fixed. This is all very well, but it ignores the wishes of those folks who found that the additional notifications, particularly of backups, are extremely useful. It also points up Microsoft’s rather sloppy approach to the documentation of WHS 2011.
Since Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have declined to fix what many see as a bug, I’m pleased to report that a third party has stepped forward instead.
Jerry Wade has developed a utility (Home Server Status) for your Desktops and Laptops that indicates when a backup is in progress. Plus, it does a few other nifty things as well.
Check it out here.
I installed it and stopped using Microsoft’s Launchpad application, and have never looked back. I can thoroughly recommend it to ex-WHS v1 users who think that WHS 2011 has lost the plot with its bloated Launchpad application. And for those WHS 2011 users who are new to all of this, you could do worse than to check HSS out.
Hi, I have some problems relating to a (lethal) combination of WHS Vail expiration, Raid Array failures, and needing access to a client computer backup that may or may not be there. Do you think you might be able to help?
Joe, I suggest that you ask your question in one of the community support forums, e.g.:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whs2011/threads
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/forum/196-windows-home-server-2011/
http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/forum/36-windows-home-server-2011/
Personally, I deliberately don’t use RAID in my server, so I have no experience to draw upon. Hope that someone else can help in the forums.
Thanks very much! Hope someone there can help!
As you may be aware, I’m not very happy with the Media Library in Windows Home Server 2011. As well as the shortcomings and design issues that I wrote about here, it also turned out that WHS 2011 has a tendency to corrupt music metadata and Album art stored in the Music Library.
In one of the discussions about these issues that went on in various forums, I came across a reference to an application called Bliss. It’s an application that seeks out Album covers online and will download and install them into your music collection automatically.
Since WHS 2011 had blithely overwritten all my carefully-prepared high-resolution Album art with its own low-resolution versions, I thought that I would give Bliss a whirl to see if it could repair the damage wreaked by WHS 2011.
To cut to the bottom line, Bliss does what it says on the tin, and I can recommend it; but there are a few quirks to be aware of if you want to use it to maintain Album art on a WHS 2011 system.
What follows is the detail of what I did and what I found…
While Bliss can be installed and run on WHS 2011, it is not packaged as a true Add-in application for WHS 2011. Add-ins are designed to be downloaded onto your Desktop PC or your Laptop, and installed onto your WHS 2011 from there. Once installed, the Add-in appears in the WHS 2011 Dashboard, where the application can be accessed and controlled. Bliss, on the other hand, is packaged as a traditional application. Once installed and started, it runs in the background and is accessed and controlled via your web browser. This means that it can be installed on your Desktop, your laptop, or the home server. Once running, you can point Bliss at the location of your Music Library, and it will go to work.
To install Bliss on WHS 2011, you need to open up a Remote Desktop Connection to your WHS 2011 system to gain access to the Administrator’s Desktop on the server. From there, you can double-click on the Bliss Setup program, and it will be installed on the server. Since it is installed in a server environment, it is best that it is running as a Windows service. That way, it will automatically start up when the server is booted – you won’t need to manually start it. Full instructions on how to install it as a Windows service are given on the Bliss web site here.
Once Bliss is running (either as a Windows service, or by being started manually), then access to the functions of Bliss is done via a web browser. If Bliss is running on your Desktop, then accessing Bliss is done via the URL: http://localhost:3220. However, if it is running on your WHS 2011, then you’ll need to point your Desktop PC web browser to http://Servername:3220, where Servername is the name of your server. And here comes the first quirk. When I tried that, the web browser failed to find the Bliss web page.
The reason is that installing Bliss on WHS 2011 does not automatically add in a Firewall rule to allow access via the 3220 TCP port. I needed to once again open up a Remote Desktop Connection to my WHS 2011 system to gain access to the Administrator’s Desktop on the server. From there, I used the Windows Firewall Management applet to create a new TCP port rule to allow inbound access to port 3220:
I also made sure that this rule was only valid for my Home (private) network:
Now, to me, all this remote accessing of the Administrator’s Desktop of the WHS 2011 system in order to install the program (preferably as a Windows service) and configure the firewall stretches beyond what I think the average Home User can reasonably be expected to cope with. It is OK for those of us who are comfortable rummaging about under the hood, but not, I think, for your average Home User who really wants to view WHS 2011 as a backup and storage appliance for his or her digital media. The design principle of WHS 2011 should be that such a user can access and control all the necessary functionality of the system via the WHS 2011 Dashboard. The system should be simple to install, run and maintain.
For Bliss to fit this paradigm, it would be necessary for it to be available as a true WHS 2011 Add-in. Since it’s not available in this form, if you are going to install it on your WHS 2011 system, you have to know what you’re doing, and feel comfortable about rummaging in the innards of WHS 2011.
Please don’t think that I’m casting aspersions on the developer because Bliss is not a WHS 2011 Add-in. Turning Bliss into a proper WHS 2011 Add-in can be a major development and rewrite project, and frankly, given the less than stellar impact WHS 2011 has had in the market, I doubt that the monetary returns would justify the work for many applications such as Bliss.
Given all the above, then if you are just an ordinary Home User who wants to have a nifty Album art application for your music collection on your WHS 2011 system, then what should you do? My recommendation would be simply to install it on your Desktop PC or Laptop, and use it from there. You can point Bliss to your music library on your WHS 2011 system and everything’s hunky-dory.
Well, almost.
Remember that I said that WHS 2011 corrupts Album art? The reason is that, by default, WHS 2011 runs a scheduled task every 24 hours to replace what you think the Album art should be with what Microsoft thinks it should be.
That’s bad enough, but even worse is that when this task replaces your high-resolution Album art file with its crappy low-resolution version, it sets the attributes of the file to “Hidden” and “System”. A file with these attributes cannot be updated by Bliss – any attempt to do so will generate an “Access denied” error.
So, I’m afraid that even if you are just an ordinary Home User, you will still need to use a Remote Desktop Connection to your WHS 2011 system to do three things:
Then Bliss will be free to do its stuff and supply decent quality Album art where it can.
You know, it’s somewhat ironic that Microsoft has shot itself in the foot here. Far from supplying an operating system that can form the basis of a backup and storage appliance, the shortcomings of WHS 2011 are often working against that goal. Applications such as Bliss are in danger of being subject to collateral damage through no fault of their own.
I’m happy to continue to use Bliss, because, as I said, it does what it says on the tin. I just have to keep an eye on WHS 2011, because it often does not.
Hi Geoff, this is Dan, the developer for bliss. You have a good point about the installer – maybe it should “punch some holes” in the firewall, if allowed by the user. It would be a generally useful step for all versions of the product. I’ll take a look into how easy this is.
Great tip Geoff. Might look at Bliss myself.
@Dan – maybe you could also build in some logic to have a checkbox with ‘Force overwrite of Folder.jpg files set as Hidden and System’, and then… well, nuff said.
Hah! Far too straightforward, Al 😉 Maybe that is something I might look at.
So the final half of the sixth series of the regenerated Doctor Who kicked off last night with “Let’s Kill Hitler”. Oh, but I did enjoy every single moment of it. Steven Moffat is such a brilliant and audacious writer, and the excellent actors have a field day with his lines.
Look, I don’t care that there were some probable plot holes – the Doctor should have known about River’s lipstick trick by now – I was still loving every single moment: the introduction of Mel, the growing-up sequences, the use of Hitler as a MacGuffin, the antibodies in the tesselrator channelling the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation of Douglas Adams, the redemption of Mel/River… It was a blast. Knocked the current sorry mess of Torchwood into a cocked hat.
If you are an enthusiast photographer using a digital camera, you may well have set your camera to take photos using its RAW format. It’s what every professional photographer does. The rest of us take the easy way out, and take photos using our cameras, smartphones, or similar image capture devices using the ubiquitous JPEG format.
The advantage of the RAW format is that, like the old film negative, it contains the truest record of the data captured by the camera’s image sensor. That data can be processed to suit what the photographer wants as the final image. In traditional photography, this is equivalent to processing the negative into the final positive print.
The JPEG format, on the other hand, can be thought of as the end result of the image processing that happens in the camera itself using a standard set of parameters. While the image can be further tweaked in computer applications, the flexibility of what can be done, as compared to that when using the RAW format, is severely limited.
Microsoft’s Windows has, over the years, supported the JPEG format out of the box. That means that utilities such as the Windows Explorer will display thumbnails of your JPEG images and tools such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery will be able to process those images further.
However, up until now, support of the RAW format has not been present in Windows itself. If you have images using a RAW format, Windows has probably given you a message telling you that it can’t display the image, and suggesting that you go to your camera manufacturer’s web site to download and install an image codec to plug into the Windows Imaging Component of Windows that will enable the display of your images.
There are also third party software solutions that offer portmanteau RAW codecs for a wide range of cameras and RAW formats (each camera manufacturer defines their own RAW format in a unique way). These third party solutions have been around since the days of Windows XP.
Now, Microsoft have trumpeted that, in order to make it easy for the consumer, they have developed their own portmanteau codec for a range of RAW formats. This can be downloaded and installed into Windows. It enables both Windows Explorer and Windows Live Photo Gallery to display RAW images directly.
While I think it’s a good thing that Microsoft have done this, what left a nasty taste in my mouth, in both the announcement and the accompanying video, was there was no acknowledgement whatsoever of existing third party solutions. Even worse were the statements such as that made by Jason Cahill in the video that the Microsoft codec supports “all the cameras you may have had or may have now”. Er, no, it doesn’t.
Axel Rietschin, the developer of the excellent FastPictureViewer Codec Pack has made an excellent comparison between his own offering and Microsoft’s codec. If you are interested in seeing the full picture, and wanting a superior codec pack, then you should read it.
Another thing that Microsoft fails to mention is that their new codec does not permit adding metadata, such as author or copyright, to the raw image, something other codecs typically do. I thought I had broken my computer when all of a sudden I could no longer add copyright information. I went back to using Nikon’s codec although it has limitations on a 64-bit system (I use a Nikon camera). I prefer to add certain metadata to the raw image so I don’t forget to do so after conversion and processing.
Ludwig at cafeludwig.com
… so, published 6 months ago, and still no word on supporting RAF (Fuji RAW)… not a problem using CS, but it’d be nice to run a batch convert and have them accessible to WHS…
This is a very difficult post to write. It concerns my oldest and closest friend.
We first met back in the early 1970s when I first moved up to London. I wanted to do some volunteer work, and ended up asking a gay counselling organisation, Centre, if I could be a volunteer. I was interviewed by, amongst others, Dr. Leonard Patrick Curran, a psychologist who was working for the UK’s Home Office in the Prison Service department at the time.
Thus began a friendship that has continued for almost forty years. Alas, it has now been brought to a close because Len has died.
Len Curran was a psychologist and an epidemiologist. He worked for many years in the UK’s Prison Service where he was responsible for the development of policy on HIV/AIDS in prisons, for medical research and ethics. After leaving the Prison Service he worked for international agencies such as the World Health Organisation and the International Red Cross as a consultant on infectious diseases in uniformed services. In this capacity he worked in over 40 countries across the globe. He was also a Trustee on the Board of Red Kite Learning for six years.
He was, perhaps, the most intelligent man I have ever known personally. He could also be, and frequently was, the most frustrating, infuriating, and angst-inducing friend that ever was inflicted upon us mere mortals. Len did not suffer fools gladly.
I liken the experience of knowing Len to that of living on the slopes of a volcano. The intellectual view is amazing, wonderful and far-reaching, the soil of intelligent discussion is rich, deep and fertile. But every now and then there comes an eruption, seemingly out of nowhere, and then you are simply left wondering what you have done to incur the wrath of the gods.
I don’t think I ever measured up to his exacting standards – I suspect very few did. But, all the same, I kept going back for more. He was a powerful drug, that at its best delivered pure enlightenment and joie de vivre.
He supported me through good times and bad times, and he also provided the lash to my back when he thought I was not measuring up.
In the late 1970s, we bought a house together in London’s Maida Vale. A former squat, it was a Victorian terrace house that had seen far better days. I remember the first time he drove me along the street – Bristol Gardens – pointing out the two properties that he thought we should put in a bid for. He was very excited at the prospect of us going into a joint project together, I was just looking at the faded glory, the bricked-up windows and thinking: “Aarghh!”
I thought he was out of his mind. However, such was his persuasive power that we ended up as the successful bidders for one of the two properties: 15 Bristol Gardens. Then came the heartburn of securing the finance – Len’s first option, the Allied Irish Bank (Len was born in Belfast), got cold feet, but finally we managed to persuade Barclays Bank to come through with the mortgages. With the help of an architect friend (Peter W.) and a builder (Peter B.), this disaster of a house was turned into two flats – one for Len (the garden flat) and one for me (the top two floors). I’m afraid that we managed to drive our builder into bankruptcy in the process, but eventually, and through a lot of our own work, we ended up with two flats in the up and coming area of Maida Vale. The house was a bit cantankerous, but it did deliver a lot of pleasure and good times during the 1980s to us both. Here’s Len partaking of breakfast in his garden at the back of the house.
I moved to the Netherlands for my work in late 1983, and eventually started renting out the top flat to a succession of people. This put Len in the position of being the landlord’s representative living downstairs, a role that he certainly didn’t want or ask for. However, after telling me in no uncertain terms that he objected to the role being thrust upon him, he accepted it with good grace and performed it admirably. Finally, in 1995, I sold the flat to Len. I can’t now recall how long he continued to live in Bristol Gardens, but eventually he sold the house and moved to a house in a nearby Mews.
Up until mid-2004, I would often be back in London on business, and very often stayed with Len. That invariably meant very late nights full of wide-ranging conversations washed down by a bottle or two of wine (or, as he would say: a bucket of wine). I recall one occasion, following a visit to the newly-opened Tate Modern, where we sat up all night talking about the art, and life in general. Fortunately, I did not have to go to work the following morning.
Because I was living in the Netherlands in the mid-1980s, Len stepped in to being in direct contact with a friend of mine who was HIV-positive. As a result, he became close friends with Kerry, with whom he shared the same wicked sense of humour. The three of us went on holiday together to the South of Spain in September 1986.
We stayed in the holiday home owned by Kerry’s sister in Murcia. They drove down in Kerry’s car from Calais, having many adventures on the way, while I flew to Malaga, where they picked me up. By the time we arrived at the house, it was dark, so they asked me to go ahead and switch on the porch light while they got the case out of the car. I didn’t suspect a thing, so I went ahead, found the switch and turned it on. Instantly, a swarm of insects and beetles flew straight at me – some of them bright green, and hard, like dried peas. Naturally, I let out a shriek, whereupon Len and Kerry turned to each other and said loudly in unison: “Yep, he’s a queen…”
Kerry and Len could both truthfully say that they had danced with Nureyev. Kerry, because he was a ballet dancer by profession, and Len, because he once met Nureyev at a party and asked him for a dance.
Len lived life to the full; I could never keep up with him. So I contented myself with listening to the many tales that he told. He was a great raconteur, and at many a dinner-party would hold us all spellbound as he wove his tales, which were frequently outrageous and would reduce his listeners to tears of laughter. He moved through all of society’s strata, and brought back stories to share with us. As a result of this oral storytelling, most of his anecdotes only exist in our memories, but here’s one I found in one of his letters:
It reminds me of when I was staying at the Loyal Liver Hotel in Bangkok (Royal River Hotel). Eventually I got so used to this that I used to leap into a taxi and with a straight face say in perfect Thai-English “Loyal Liver Hotel, Sangheee!” Which usually worked, though not always, because not all taxi drivers spoke Tinglish. So the hotels had cards printed with the address in English on one side and in Thai on the other.
One night I had been out visiting the boy-boy and boy-girl bars with the AIDS Task Force and they gave me a card showing their new condom promotion campaign for sex tourists which said: “Welcome to Bangkok. We want you to be safe whilst you are here. Please wear this condom when you are with me and it will make me feel safer and we can have good times together”. English on one side, Thai language on the other.
At the end of the evening, I leapt into a taxi and said “Loyal Liver hotel Sangheee!”, but no response so I took out a card and gave it to the taxi driver, who as Thais do when they haven’t understood, went into a meditative state to work out what you mean. We sat like that for a few minutes until I realised I’d given him the wrong card. I can imagine him later telling his wife in Thai: “Hey Martha, you’ll never guess what happened tonight!”
He also had a reflective side, so that his stories could also be moving and profound. I keep a letter in which he describes the experience of attending the funeral of a friend’s father where he pens loving portraits of the participants that bring them instantly to mind for me.
In September 1996, Len turned 50. Despite living in London, Len decided to mark the occasion by holding the party in Southern Spain at a campsite run by José and Tony, two close friends of his. People came from far and wide and it was a huge success. We ended the party dinner with a singing contest between the Spaniards and the rest of the guests fighting back with a variety of Irish, Scottish, American and German ditties. I think it was a draw, but my memory was extremely hazy by that point in the evening…
Len was born into an Irish Catholic family. Whilst in later life, he was an atheist and no longer a practicing Catholic, he recognised the value of his Catholic education:
During that time I received a very good education, compassion for those poorer and needier than me, a sense of honesty and of public service which I followed all my working life. I never suffered any guilt and I often laugh when I hear my ex-prison service psychologist (English) colleagues pontificate about ‘Catholic’ guilt. The most guilt ridden people I’ve met have been the English… not the French, Spanish, Irish or Italians. It’s true that in Ireland ‘Holy Mother Church’ was very down on sex but without that the whole country would have been at it day and night!!
Late in life, he had the rewards of being the “uncle” to the twin children of his dearest friend, Mo (Mohammed). He doted on Ayman and Ayaa, and they adored him in return.
He often remarked to me on the simple and unalloyed joy that they brought him. They, like his beloved Mo, will miss Len sorely.
In 2009, although he was not in the best of health, he still made the effort to travel to the Netherlands and attend my 60th birthday party. During the weekend we were together we again had the opportunity to talk about life in general and at length. We talked about the choice of music for our own funerals. Typical of Len, as well as the Mozart and Monteverdi, one of the songs he wanted to have at his own memorial service was Marlene Dietrich singing “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have”:
See what the boys in the backroom will have
And tell them I’m having the same
Go see what the boys in the backroom will have
And give them the poison they nameAnd when I die don’t spend my money
On flowers and my picture in a frameChorus: Just see what the boys in the backroom will have
And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried
And tell them I died of the sameAnd when I die don’t buy a casket of silver
With the candles all aflameJust see what the boys in the backroom will have
And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried
And tell them I died of the sameAnd when I die don’t pay the preacher
For speaking of my glory and my fameJust see what the boys in the backroom will have
And tell them I sighed and tell them I cried
And tell them I died of the same
I last saw Len in person in January 2011, when I visited him in the Royal Free Hospital in London over the course of three days. It was the opportunity for him to confirm his choice of music for his memorial service; he gave me my instructions as to what he wanted, and which versions. It was also an opportunity to reminisce on all the times we had together. When the time came to take our leave, we both fully expected that this would be the last we would see of each other. It was bittersweet, but with no regrets. However, Len had one last trick up his sleeve.
Len was moved to a Nursing Home, but he was determined to get back home to his house in Oliphant Street and lead as independent a life as he could to the very end. It seemed an impossible goal back in January, but once Len put his mind to something, he would get there. And get there, he did. In June, he moved back home. I spoke to him a few times via computer video conference, and he was very much improved and on very good form. The difference between then and when I saw him in January was incredible.
It was, perhaps, too good to last. He went back into hospital very recently, and developed heart problems last Sunday. He died a peaceful death yesterday. Mo rang us late last night with the news. Martin says that we should open our best bottle of champagne and drink it to his memory, and today that’s just what we’ll do.
Len, for all the ups and downs we had, it’s been wonderful. We miss you.
Leonard Patrick Curran
16 September 1946 – 10 August 2011
A right ‘Royal’ eulogy for a regal and well loved fella.
Chris Connor
Prachtig verwoord. Een mooi man en een fijne vriend.
Carolien Kooi
Many condolences, Geoff. What a wonderful friendship to have enjoyed. And how bittersweet to recall.
Now it’s time to reply to Geoff’s blog about Len.
When I read Geoff’s Blog, the tears ran over my face. Len was a special friend for Geoff and vice versa. I know that Len would be very proud about what Geoff wrote about him.
Len came into my life when I was introduced as the new lover of Geoff, it happened a hundred years ago… He was not convinced about me and saw me as a handsome guy with not much cells in the brain. It took years to get to know each other, the distance, the language, misunderstandings etc.
I wish my English was better, but I do my best.
In the years to come Len and I came to understand each other with respect and on the 60th birthday of Geoff ( I secretly invited Len for the party in the Netherlands) Len came to stay with us.
That evening/night Len and I spend the night talking, a lot of drinks and cigarettes, from 4 till 9 o ‘clock in the morning. He wanted to know why I loved Geoff and in the end he gave me his blessings. That was a struggle for me to explain my thoughts and feelings to such an intellectual man, but I managed and it affected our friendship in a very warm way.
My love for the man, who was a very dear friend for more than 40 years of my lover.
martin van hooft
Lovely… someone I would have wanted to know…
Ed
16 Sept 1947
[…] latest episode of Doctor Who aired. I had travelled to Northern Ireland to say a final goodbye to my dearest friend. That’s another story, and I don’t feel ready to tell it, so instead I’ll turn to the […]
Geoff, that’s an amazingly well-written piece. Thank you for making, in some small way, such a person real for the rest of us.
[…] My dearest friend, Len, had, amongst his many other talents, an eye for Art. Many was the time during his travels abroad that he would struggle back with a sculpture, or a huge painting, and then argue with the airline about excess baggage. […]
Dear Geoff I am grieved to learn about the death of Len Curran.I first met him in the mid seventies when he was involved with a counselling service for gay men.We became friends and our relationship continued until I moved to Australia in 1979.It was resumed on my visits to London and we travelled to Spain in 1989 and stayed with Tony and Jose.After another falling out in the early nineties,I never saw him again,I may have met you when I stayed at the grand house in Maida Vale
I would like to contact Lens sister and Tony and Jose in Spain,and would like their e-mail details..if possible
regards
Abed
Abed, thanks very much for your comment. I’ll send you a private reply.
Many years (almost 20?) ago I had an enormous pleasure to meet and work for a couple of days with Len, over one of his numerous travels abroad. This time to Warsaw. Some time later we met again in his home in Little Venice, visited Holloway and Wormwood Scrubs. Born just a week earlier than my Mother …. Amazing personality. And wonderful recollection. Thank you.
Piotr
[…] of Margi Levy in the Guardian. I knew Margi back in the 1970s. I met her via a mutual friend, Len Curran. She was warm, funny, passionate and intelligent. Len was a great one for having parties, and I […]
[…] on BBC television in the late 1980s. The woman had style and wit. She was also the neighbour of my best friend who was living in a London Mews at the the time. I’m sorry I never had the opportunity to meet […]
[…] doesn’t seem possible that it has been ten years since Len died. He is still much missed. He still occasionally visits me in my dreams. I’ll be back in a […]
A very touching memorial.
I knew Len in the mid 70s. He and I were students together at the Institute of Education in London – we were doing a Masters degree in Reseach Methods in Child Psychology. For a few years we were firm friends until i moved to New Orleans in 1981.
Thanks for publishing your recollections of him. He was a remarkable man – larger than life!
Peter Clark
[…] at La Scala. She said that she had never seen Nureyev in person, so I told her the story of when Len & I saw him in the production he did with London Festival Ballet at the London […]
After 21 years, Charlie Kindel has left Microsoft to set up a company of his own. As far as I can remember from my days of having contacts with Microsoft, I’ve never met the man, but I know that he’s been a driving force behind some of the best consumer-focused projects within Microsoft.
The pity is that once he moved on to other projects within Microsoft, that focus on the consumer experience seems to have moved with him, and, in my opinion, the products he left behind have become moribund without his hand on the helm, or his support of the project in Microsoft’s executive circles.
I’ll give you two examples. He played a major role in the development of Windows Media Center, and he led the development of the first version of Windows Home Server.
Windows Media Center started out life in the days of the Windows XP operating system as Windows XP Media Center Edition, first available back in 2002. Later, Windows Media Center was included, as standard, in every copy of Windows for the home consumer since the days of Vista. So it’s there in Vista Home Premium and Windows 7 Home Premium. Yet I suspect that the majority of Windows users simply have no idea that it’s there or what it’s capable of. It’s left to a small band of enthusiasts who exploit WMC’s capabilities in their Home Entertainment or Home Theater systems. There have been no major new features added to WMC since 2008, and many enthusiasts fear that Microsoft will drop it altogether with the forthcoming introduction of Windows 8.
It’s been a similar story with Windows Home Server. Kindel led the development of the Q project (that became the first version of Windows Home Server released in 2007) with an absolute focus on the home consumer. He even went so far as to issue a set of guiding principles for the design of the storage system for WHS that were predicated on the needs of the home consumer. After the release of that first version of WHS, Kindel moved on. The WHS team got reorganised, and this year released the second version: Windows Home Server 2011. In the process, they effectively tore up Kindel’s guiding principles, and the result has been a product that while it bears the word “Home” in its title, is far less focused on the home consumer than the first version.
Kindel’s last project at Microsoft has been to lead the development of Windows Phone 7. I sincerely hope that with his departure that project will also not lose its way.
[…] Kindel worked in Microsoft for over twenty years, and knows the company well. What I found particularly telling in today’s post was the observation that there are still organisational silos there: I know some of the people who drove the Xbox360 hardware design and supply chain management. They are now war scarred and seasoned experts. They are the type of people you want working on the next big thing. None of them even knew about Surface until it was announced. Typical Microsoft organizational silos. […]
Today is the 6th August, 2011, and it’s the day of the annual Canal Parade in Amsterdam. I usually travel the 150 km to Amsterdam and join the 400,000+ onlookers to watch it, but this year I’m staying home. However, my thoughts will be there, in particular for my old colleagues from Shell who will be dancing on the Company Pride boat. Good luck, guys and gals – hope the weather gods smile on you today!
My photos of some of the previous Canal Parades can be found up on Flickr.
Well, I’ve been watching the new series of Torchwood for the last three weeks, and I still can’t make up my mind about it. While it seems to be getting good reviews Stateside, I’m not convinced that all the American money that has been pumped into it has actually improved things. The production values are extremely glossy, and the storyline is intriguing, but it all feels as though everything’s been turned up to such a pitch that something has been lost. Sometimes, less is more.
Take last night, for example. There was a scene between Oswald Danes and Captain Jack, which drew a connection between the motivations of both men who have each brought about the death of a child. Danes gloried in the fact while Jack has an almost unbearable sense of guilt. It was a powerful scene, with good writing and acting, but I wished that they could have got rid of the music that kept thumping away. In trying to build tension, the music actually destroyed the horror and power of the scene for me.
Still, there are some good things in it. There are good ideas in it, starting with the deceptively simple theme of “no one dies” and building out from there. And the writers have clearly had some fun with the exchanges between the characters – last week’s comic relief of the air steward insisting that he wasn’t gay, or last night’s cutting remark from Rex telling Jack to act his age, when of course there’s another level of irony there that Rex is currently unaware of. Serious moments, too, as when Jack desperately wants reassurance from Gwen that their partnership means something, but while she initially gives him that, she is soon distracted by the sight of her husband and baby, and leaves Jack talking into his phone by himself, unaware that the connection has been lost.
I’m not entirely convinced by all the new characters introduced in this series. Most still feel one-dimensional to me. But I do particularly like the character of Jilly Kitzinger, played by Lauren Ambrose. With her flaming red hair, bright red lipstick and red clothes, I wonder who – or what – Kitzinger is. The devil in disguise, probably.
Update: I see that the Guardian has raised the question of whether this series of Torchwood is any good or not.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a patch on Children of Earth. But then, that was an unexpected treasure, given the rather hit and miss results of the earlier series of Torchwood.
I’ve stopped watching Miracle Day. I really can’t be bothered. Mind you, I still think that Lauren Ambrose was mesmerising.
I agree Geoff, in fact I don’t like it as much as the first one. I wasn’t aware that they had pumped money into it, but it is too much about America and also has far too much influence from them. We make far better dramas etc over here than America does and ‘americanising’ something spoils it in my opinion.
Yup, TG, I don’t think it’s “our” Torchwood any more. It’s been seduced Stateside 🙂
CORRECT THIS PROGRAMME HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY MONEY AND SO STUPID THEY DO NOT DIE SO THE WORLD OVER THE LAST FOUR WEEKS MUST BE LOOKING FOR FOOD.
I think it’s awfull now. Theyve ruined it. Where’s the “Above The Law”, Beyond The Government, the Tec.
It’s become like every other lame American. Gun Ho drama. The story lines are too long and to complicated.
Sorry but it’s become rubbish.
It clashes with the new Big Brother…BB wil win in our house as we dont have Sky or cable.
I absolutely agree! I am an American and I prefer British drama (and comedy) over American. I had been a Torchwood fan since Season 1. When they announced they were bringing it to American I had reservations. I am so disappointed, I feel they have ruined Torchwood. I keep trying to find some semblance of the original show and other than having Captain Jack and Gwen, it’s just not there.
If you didn’t like Miracle Day, PLEASE write the BBC and let them know!
The Torchwood I know… Fast paced, sexy tech, good action.
Today’s Torchwood… Tons of sub-plots you don’t care about, Horrible, I’m an angry CIA man acting, Yawn, wake me up when it’s over, storyline.
I think it’s awful – boring, no action, and nothing like the wonderful Torchwood that BBC Wales produced- probably on a 10th of the budget! It’s unnecessarily sexually explicit – and so American – the BBC have sold quality for money! I’m surprised they want their name attached to it.
Well, to be fair, Susie, Torchwood has always been positioned as adult entertainment, rather than for families with young children, so I don’t view it as “unnecessarily” sexually explicit – I view it as to be expected. And to be honest, I thought the “safe sex” message of last week’s episode was a nice touch…
I thought Jack was supposed to be omni-sexual but recently it’s only about the men. I suspect John Barrowman has had that written into his contract ;). I’m enjoying aspects about this series but I agree overall the American gloss distracts and takes away from the proceedings, which is a shame.
The last time I was this much disappointed was when they replaced Sean Connery with Roger Moore. Bond character became almost comical. The same thing is happening to the Torchwood team. Gwen chatting with her husband on a mobile while reconnecting server wiring in what was supposed to be a tense dramatic moment! And what of the constant mobile use? Americans don’t have satellites and voice recognition software to instantly recognize them and than pinpoint their location? And the music is so distracting – I wish it was on a separate track so that it can be turned off. I am not watching the remaining episodes.
I miss the Torchwood headquarters and when it wasn’t so complicated with a 10 episode story!
There is so much to not like (unfortunately), especially when the all of the past stories and episodes have been so good. I have found myself saying after every episode, “what actually happened?”. I was very amused by the recent comedy series ‘Episodes’, which was a great AmeriBrit production (though I have no idea how it was received in the US), however I can’t help but think that what was offered up as comedic farce in Episodes has come to destroy what was a truly great sci-fi series. For me though the absolute worst thing about it is the background music. It’s cheesy, cliche and very often unnecessary not to mention extremely distracting. I don’t need a lame piece of pacey ‘spy style’ limp rock music to reassure me that it’s a chase scene, that was given away by the huge helicopter following the jeep at considerable speed.
I thought I was the only one who had spotted the parallel of life imitating art, with the premise of “Episodes” and what happened to the integrity of an idea once the American production machine mascerated and homogenised it. Too slow (too many episodes), too many fingers in the pie!
Anyone watching should be able to process more than 1 or 2 minor plot developments an episode.
How come Gwen can get into and out of an ultra-secure hi-tech server room with a complete server on the other side of the Atlantic without getting caught, but can’t get her Dad out a poorly staffed “hospital” camp just down the road in Wales?
Give me answers or I’ll be re-classifying Torchwood as Category 1 (Pass the red peg please).
Spoiler kind of !
Its got something to do with the name!
“DEAD is DEAD”
“PhiCORPS” – everyone, everywhere for a long time ?!
New story enlivend Torchwood, how could they have carried it on? Original ended but, two members remained. So what if it is in America, the cradle of conspirisy theorys, don,t anyone get it?
Mad, sureal best place in America. I think it’s gripping, I can’t workout what is going to happen next, government experiments, (after all we are all living longer death is further away for all of us). This is an extreme version of what could happen. Hell,I have to work til I’m 65yrs and 9 months, by todays standards I could live till I’m 120yrs old, with all the diseases et al then what? Young people won’t have jobs because the older generation are still in them. Strain on jobs market, in fact no jobs for all Uni Grads as oldys are still working! So you tunneled visioned thinkers look at the wider picture, What if!!! Our world wide economys are stressed, pensions are always in the news, iif my generation lives to 100 yrs old and work till they are 70 yrs old how is the world economy going to work then. Agecide so jobs can be released for 2 generations who themselves will have longevity. Ffood shortages, housing shortages good greif it goes on.
This Americanised version is dreadful, used to love Torchwood, but it is now unwatchable.
We are finding it getting boring to watch – this is not Torchwood. We are even starting to talk over the show and even contemplating turning over.
This has been a bad mistake and will kill off Torchwood. May be getting good reviews but viewing figures are crap – not even a third of BBC figures.
Mr Davies has gone over to the darkside.
I used to love Torchwood when produced in wales but this seems to be a very drawn-out saga about nothing really. And why on earth did we have to watch Jack and his sexual exploits with another man? What has that got to do with the plot (if there is one). We all know John Barrowman is gay we don’t need to be shown it as well. Im still struggling to work out what;s going on.
I think that you are confusing the actor with the character…
OK so Torchwood is different…unnecessary homophobic scenes… Americanised and in danger of becoming nothing but a vehicle for John Barrowman.
I too hope it goes back to the darker earlier format where you had different adventures every week (or two) and a close interesting team of characters.
But the thought of everything happening around Cardiff used to be very silly too.
However, I still find the new series intriguing, the scene of being the living dead inside a squashed car was almost X-Files.
Let’s hope it continues to expand into something more…
Oh one thing I noticed was that the music in episode 4 was very rousing and I thought I’d heard it somewhere before, however, I waited to see if there was mention of where it came from.
The end titles said the score was written by Gold… Yet I found the music on the album Verve 3 Remixed…. The shows music sounded in parts like an orchestrated version of Sarah Vaughans FEVER remixed by Adam Freeland 2005.
The Remix was also used recently in the The Adjustment Bureau.
Um, I think you meant “homophilic”, not “homophobic”. As to whether they were unnecessary, that’s a personal opinion. 🙂
I agree… the old torchwood before this “Miracle Day” were good plots and interesting. Jack is depicted as falling into one problem after another as though he’s stupid. We have enough USA scfi programs if we want that style. I was looking forward to this but after the plane episode what a load of rubbish. Bring back the old torchwood, stop Americanising and thinking of the big buck!!!!!!!!!!
Last point. The Doctor would have solved this in two episodes Tops!!!!!!
That’s my wifes opinion too.
She’s got to the point where she’s only watching because she wants the answers.
Maybe the FF through iPlayer/TiVo option mentioned by Asterion is the way to go since it’s 50 minutes of un-sophisticated padding followed by a dash of reveal 😦
That’s great. I love your point! It’s so true. I’m so excited that Dr Who is back on next week!
As Americans, both Dr Who and Torchwood fans, my husband and I are disgusted by what they have done to this series. We so enjoyed the first to iterations and although we hated the end of “Children of Earth”, we still loved Torchwood. This is yet another sad example of how American producers are too lazy to create (or keep i.e. firefly) a truly unique and riveting syfy drama that has the bones of Torchwood. The constant “reminders” of Americanizms are insulting and degrading, “Agent Rex” is an idiot any weval could have delt with, Gwen’s character is torn and being robbed of her strengths while Captian Jack has been turned into a whimpering fool. Really?! NONE of that works. Oh, and for the record, the CIA has NO agents. That’s the FBI. The CIA has officers. Even the most basic things weren’t researched, but they felt the need to explain, “chips vs crisps”.
Agggh car crash telly at its worst, get to the end already,! Please, cos I don’t think I can take any more. No no no no and I just realised there are six more episodes. I used to love Torchwood, but oh dear I am afraid that I am no longer a fan
Used to love torchwood – especially children of our time (although like the post above – i didn’t like the ending), but has the writer(s) changed because this new serious falls seriously short of the others in my honest opinion, without wanting to sound too harsh, it is probably one of the worst series of anything I have ever watched in my life, very little happens in each episode, it is annoying to watch, casting isn’t great, the plot goes off at a tangent so frequently & I could go on ….. please sort it out if there is another series.
The latest episode of torchwood has left me feeling disgusted, did we need that, i hate to think whats coming, america, leave these series alone, whoever wrote this, i hope i never see any of your work again.
Must say the latest series is a major disappointment. Far too Americanised to be watchable. All the US characters are bland and spew out the most awful predictable dialog. The US characters are also too dumb to be Torchwood! Bring back our Welsh based version! We want it back BBC !!!
Everyone seems to be missing the point that the BBC dropped the series because of poor viewing figures, and no other UK company picked it up, so what you see is what you get, my take on it is an entirely new series with a nod to old legacies, and you know what?, it ain’t half bad!
I think that this series is actually good and we have our new torchwood team here i would like to see rex,ester and doctor warez with jack and gwen back in cardiff in a new hub as a team in another series i would like a few more series and to be honest this series might seem different in lay out but its still torchwood and its delivering in ny opinion. Yet another great series which keeps you discussing for hours after and hopefully they will make a few more series after this.
Maybe bbc will make it right
I know that the Torchwood team are good, very good indeed, but I didn’t know that their talents extended to car maintenance – to explain: in the episode in which the team steal a car, Gwen clearly breaks the back window with a brick or stone, but when they are travelling in the car to the warehouse, there is no breeze blowing through to ruffle anyone’s hair. Therefore, the window has been replaced before they set off.
Now that ‘s good going.
In the first series I was really enjoying watching Torchwood super-secret team driving in the car with its name engraved on it, so why I shouldn’t laugh watching Gwen on a phone during the break-out into computer centre? Even more, the network cables coming in and out of the server do not make any technical sense at all, but an exact copy of the computer equipment would make the scene dull. The same is with the plot, too much reality and it will break. I like the story so far, it would be interesting to see if all the lines are followed. And more Captain Jack please.
I have every episode of Torchwood on DVD, I’ve watched them all hundreds of times over and I have to say This series is very disappointing. It’s far too ‘American’, Torchwood has always been about Cardiff and surrounding areas. I feel this american input on the show has ruined the great reputation built from all the hard work and efforts put into the first 3 series. Personally I think they should go back to the format of series 1 and 2, with a new case every episode but a continuing story line too. Then again it’s still Torchwood and it’s still worth watching for any fan but I certainly wont be watch this series over as much as the others when it makes DVD… Lets just hope series 5 brings the new team back into more of the Torchwood we have come to love and hopefully becomes less American again, Captain Jack is all the American input we need 😀
This seems to be a possibly excellent episode (or two-parter) stretched micron thin over a ridiculous 10 episodes.
It’s just sooooo slllooooowwwwwww!! Minuscule plot developments are eked out over each relatively uneventful episode. For example, the relatively obvious revelation that the “modules” were furnaces took pretty much all of the last episode.
I realise that the hard of thinking US audience might lap this up (as from the reviews they evidently do). But for we British license-payers who are used to the old (and MUCH better) Torchwood and Dr Who, could the BBC please edit out all the plodding chaff, and put together a more watchable 2-hour version of the series.
I’ve now given up on the series (I just find myself shouting “Move the f*** on!” at the screen) but may watch it in fast forward on iPlayer at some point in the future. If the BBC don’t step up to the task, I’m sure someone will put up an edited mash-up of the series on YouTube.
What a shame… At least we aren’t footing the entire bill for this travesty.
A.
Well I excepted the rather OTT storyline up until they introduced the whole ‘concentration camp’ burning people situation. That is just wrong. Don’t think i’ll be watching anymore episodes, and certainly not if the america’s continue making it. Shame really.
accepted not excepted, my rather shocking spelling there.
Plot is slow and seems to be going nowhere fast. And the violence seems to just want to shock for no reason. It all seems just a waste of time. There is no tongue in cheek humor in it, I won’t be watching anymore.
I love Torchwood and all that goes with it and this new series was long awaited but I have to say less America and more Britain, we do this so much better. I feel that recently the BBC seem to have lost track of what the licence fee is for (and who pays it) and keep looking State side and dropping homegrown products. Stop meddling with a program that knew its identity and get back on with doing what you do best.
hi guys ive always been a fan of torchwood and also doctor who but there is one question on my mind at minute will they get the doctor in. this is the sort of thing he cant miss.
So yet another American series that has bored me to tears, I am quite intrigued to see what’s causing the miracle, but I’ve got to the point where I just can’t be bothered. It’s just sooooooo sloooooow, we’re learning one fact a week and I’ve got better things to do with higher rewards. RTD should have squashed it into a mini series like Children of Earth and it might have been quite good. But I’m starting to wish he hadn’t bothered at all. I think from now I’ll just read the blogs to find out what happened and do something more constructive with my time on a Thursday evening, then I’ll be spared the music……..Ex Torchwood fan signing out…….
What happened to Science Fiction. This is just another soap opera. 1st episode Establish main plot – no-one dies except Jack, 2nd Ep Establish characters, 3rd Ep Establish each characters Achilles heal, 4th Ep drag plot out – introduce new short term characters and kill a few off, 5th Ep Finalize a few personal issues, 6th Ep use Gwen’s Achilles head to control her (like you didn’t know that was coming) I feel like I’m in ‘Learn to write a Soap 101’. I am so disappointed. There is so little science fiction on tv these days, Torchwood was going to be my highlight of the year (after Doctor Who i.e.) The characters are one dimensional, the plot is too slow to develop and yet more over dramatic moments from Gwen and hubby, There’s no love interest for female viewers. Now that Jack bats for one side only, there’s no reason to watch. Kill off Gwen’s husband and return us to thinking Jack loves Gwen, get rid of the CIA and bring in some out of space characters to join in. Do something or Torchwood will die and I have always enjoyed the Torchwood extension of Dr. Who.
“Now that Jack bats for one side only, there’s no reason to watch”.
Well, I rather think that depends on which side you’re batting… 🙂 Still, I take your point about Torchwood. This series is disappointing in many ways.
After watching ep.5, I dont think I will be tuning in any more either. I have been a fan of Torchwood since it began, but this isnt Torchwood at all, it’s something else. They could have taken out Jack and Gwen, and given it another name instead of ruining a decent British prgramme.
I am a Canadian fan and I have mixed feelings about Miracle Day. As much as I like Torchwood I feel that they should of stopped after Children of the Earth – the ending felt right to end the series on. Miracle Day just doesn’t fit well with the old Torchwood characters and it is boring with the usual story of government stupidity, big business greed, and revenge for hurting one’s family.
What a load of rubbish this series is. I was so disappointed to find out it was episode 6 of 10. The BBC should be ashamed that they spent UK licence viewers money on a series that is so wooden, lacking a plot and filled with head cringing period where you wonder was it worth wasting 5 minutes of my life watching it
BBC, what were you thinking? The Brit-American cooperation has an obvious bias toward the American! 10 drawn out, shallow episodes are beginning to wear on even the hardiest Torchwood fan, and I include myself in that list. Eve Myles’ character (Gwen Cooper) appears to have undergone an overnight transformation into a teenage American ‘actress’ with exaggerated mannerisms and unnecessary volume; so Amercan-esque. Like an earlier reply, I will continue to watch, but only to get the definitive on why it is a ‘Miracle Day’.
People do things in the privacy of their bedrooms – I get that. But I don’t want to see the details, regardless of the genders of those involved. Not in movies, not on TV.
Torchwood has always been pretty family-friendly, until now. Torchwood has been fun, until now. Torchwood has been one of my favorite shows, until now. Torchwood has not left a bad taste in my mouth — until now.
I like the show overall. And I’d like to watch it with my daughters. Unfortunately, every other episode has a bunch of gay sex in it and I have to pre-screen the show before letting them watch. I have gay friends and have no issues with someones sexual preferences. However, that doesn’t mean I want to watch explicit sex between two guys. Is the studio trying to turn off and alienate the majority of us that are not gay? Can’t they just imply the two characters had a sexual encounter without making us watch the guys humping each other? I’m sure that there is plenty of gay porn around to purchase for those that want to watch it. I’d just like to watch a good sci fi series with my kids without the gay porn.
Ah, the “some of my best friends are gay” defense. I note that you are not objecting to the straight sex scenes that are also in the series. What makes them OK?
Torchwood has always been the adult version of Doctor Who, the watershed in Uk is 9pm, so adults can watch more appropiate programmes, i wouldn’t let my 11 year old watch Torchwood.
Also, Torchwood has always had sex scenes in it, since the beginning.
They just need to bring back the monsters,etc. & who’s looking after the weevils(i think thats what they were called) that prowled the streets of Cardiff? There was a HQ in Scotland & London, until Cybermen took over, so bring it back to Uk, it’s lost it’s charm now & Jack’s just not dashing anymore. 😦
Hahaha.. all the whiney simpleton comments complaining about Torchwood being TOO COMPLEX! (????) Really, some of you are just using the development of this series to express your rampant anti-american sentiments, aren’t you. If you hadn’t been told that the production was being influenced by US production values, or located in America, or had anything to do with America, you’d probably all be fawning unconditionally over it. I doubt any of your denials will convince anyone one bit. Torchwood is excellent entertainment, and I enjoy watching this series.
Strange, I don’t think anyone has complained about this series being too complex… The complaints seem to be mainly about the stretching out of what is basically a simple idea over 10 episodes using one-dimensional characters… That, and the ever-present music soundtrack that tries to increase our emotional reactions and fails miserably. Still, glad that you are enjoying it. Not everyone is.
Exactly! American series have the most terrible soundtracks!
well..just watched episode 7, it seems the ‘zombie’ period of the story line has passed.
This series is so much different to the previous two series, and maybe thats why a lot of people are not liking it so much as previous, but you have to embrace change….even if it’s for a 10 part series.
I’m not sure all the sexual scenes so far are strictly necessary or indeed add to the storyline, as you dont get this sort of thing in Dr Who do you??
I have to agree with all of the unnecessary sexual scenes. Especially from episode 7. Surely a good script write could have come up with something more Si-Fi for the reason to wanting Jack killed off. But to use a whole episode about his affair with another guy in 1927 just does not wash. Bringing in the Daleks as the conspirators from his distant past would have been better than what we had last night. As for that awful music going on all the way through. When they do turn it off there is an ‘at last no music’ cry from our house.
Torchwood (all of them) Dull dialogue, dull unpersuasive acting and an overt pro Wales pro gay agenda that verges on the defensive and masquerades as existential just because Russell has a default setting for turning the lights down on happy thoughts and believes that this manifestation of sadness makes him and his work product intellectually acceptable – its all drivel (including “Queer as folk”); and the only good “Dr Who” scripts came from elsewhere, especially Moffat. Cheer up Russell and stop trying so hard, mediocre’s OK as long as you’re rich.
The reason Miracle Day is bad, isn’t because the show has become “American” or the gay sex scenes. Neither make a television show or movie bad. The reason Miracle Day is bad, is the storytellling is confused, the direction slow and some of the acting ridiculous. American television produces many excellent quality, entertaining shows. And those who argue that sex doesn’t belong in science fiction never saw an episode of Star Trek. Captain Kirk wasn’t know as a “space slut” for nothing. As a huge Torchwood fan, I am so disappointed that the characters we have come to love are totally lost. Jack and Gwen are a shell of what they were – and it leaves me wondering if the current writers have even seen the previous series. Miracle Day doesn’t look like Torchwood, and it doesn’t sound like Torchwood. The most disappointing thing is the ratings are not good, and I’m afraid this might be the end of the show, with no chance for redemption.
YAC – you’ve nailed it. Absolutely correct.
I think you have missed my point. It is not the sex scenes that I am against. It is the fact that they could have come up with a far better scenario for the reason for Miracle day revolving around some SI-Fi aspect of Jacks background. After all Torchwood was built on Si-Fi story-lines. With loads of gadgets. There is not one in the series yet.
Original Torchwood on BBC2 was excellent, loved story lines and characters.
Miracle Day is such a let down, the characters and plot are so wooden. This is a sell out to American audience, watched first four, no more.
BBC shame on you.
Please Dr Who stay British!!
I agree that the present series has left a significant amount to be desired.
Saying that it is “adult viewing” is not an acceptable get-out, all television is able to be time-shifted, those of us who work shifts have to do so.
My son who is now 13 (and was an avid viewer since the first episode of series 1) was embarrased beyond words with Jack’s gay sex scene.
Not that I have any issue with sex scenes of any sort, just that they should not be so painfully drawn-out. All this scene needed was the two characters involved holding hands and going into the bedroom closing the door behind them.
Come to think of it, that would suffice for MOST of the “sex” scenes we have foisted upon us.
Take a look at the viewing figures also. This series has lost over a million viewers since it started.
It has the lowest audience to date.
Why? Are the BBC trying to kill it off?
Please see sense, bring it back home, under British control and production, get some decent wholesome, entertaining story lines
Until then, it seems that I shall have to regrettably censor the future episodes to ensure that viewing is of a standard that I will permit my children to watch.
Come on BBC get it back to being a decent home-made series, with jokes and storylines that can be followed without painting the blindingly obvious out. Get rid of the “over-the-top” intrusive “background” music, moderate the language and refer, allude or whatever to sex – but let’s not see naked bodies cavorting around in bed.
‘Saying that it is “adult viewing” is not an acceptable get-out, all television is able to be time-shifted, those of us who work shifts have to do so’.
I’m sorry, but, hello, time-shifting is an irrelevancy – the point is what are the intended audience demographics for the show – not what time you choose personally to view it. And the fact remains that the audience for Torchwood is a different one from that for Teletubbies, and for that matter, from that of Doctor Who or for The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Sorry that your 13 year-old son found the gay sex scenes embarrassing. These things happen. When I think back to when I was 13 years old, I would probably have thought the same. But in my case, the embarrassment would have been because I was watching it with my parents, and they didn’t know, or dare to admit, that I was gay.
And I would have been thinking: “thank god I’m not alone”.
I was enjoying the series until the last one.
The open promotion of homosexuality by “Captain Jack” have ruined it for me and my family.
What was a good and interesting story has been undermined by the writer’s propaganda.
What a shame that you have had to portray this perverse life style choice as being both normal and valid and using it as the main pillar of this episode.
Sigh. All the usual tired homophobic phrases, I see. “Promotion of homosexuality”, “Perverse life style [sic] choice”, “normal and valid”. My sympathies are with your family.
Completely agree with you. Almost everyone I know that loved TW has started to turn it off for two reasons. The unnecessary gratuitous sex scenes, it makes no difference whether Jack was on top of a woman or a bloke. TW is about Si-Fi not gratuitous sex. Someone made reference to Star Trek. Difference was that they were inferences not gratuitous. TW used to be like that with just the odd male – male snog. But that was it. And it was acceptable.
Gwen has never shown her flesh to all and sundry. If she had I would complain about that too. Because there is no need for it. It adds nothing to the storyline. I still maintain that TW has lost its way in that it is no longer a Si-Fi program. Where are all the gadgets? No wonder over 1million people have switched off. Maybe the BeeB will learn from that. Although I doubt it.
Oh The second reason is that awful backing track that means you cannot hear the speech. Well the American voices anyway as they do not know how to open their mouths when they speak. AT least Jack and Gwen can provide decent diction.
As a new fan of the series but not of the Who universe, I was expecting something a bit more than what was given. I heard of Torchwood and heard of awesome things it detailed, but I literally had to watch the beginning of the series to understand why people would have thought that this was as good as Doctor Who. Going back to the originally team, I found that I loved everything about it and found it hard to connect that series with this new one. Hell, there isn’t an alien until episode seven and that was in a flashback. I agree with many of you that this series is just too long as well. What happened to that show?
It’s become something of a tradition here in this part of the Netherlands that when a baby is born, the neighbours (the buurt) will celebrate the fact by erecting a wooden stork, festooned with clotheslines of baby clothes.
This week, our nearest neighbours had the birth of their first baby, a boy. Since we are noaste naobers to them, it fell to us to organise the decorations in celebration of the fact. So, together with the other neighbours, we did. Naturally, we had to have the traditional stork:
But Martin thought that we should also push the envelope a bit. Since José and Herman have referred to their new baby as their “little prince” (kleine prins), we thought we’d take them at their word…
Now that I’ve been running my Windows Home Server 2011 system for a while, I’ve been able to observe some of the behaviours and quirks that require time to show themselves. Here are my notes on the server backup function.
As you are probably aware, WHS 2011 can only take a backup of the server data that is 2TB or less in size, and can only handle backup drives that are limited to 2TB.
[Update 31 March 2014: It appears as though there has been some improvement made to the Server Backup function in the Dashboard since I originally wrote this article. It remains the case that WHS 2011 continues to use the VHD format for backup, which has a maximum capacity of 2TB. However, it now appears (contrary to what Microsoft originally stated) as though the Server Backup function can now deal with multiple VHDs, providing the backup drive is big enough. So, if your backup drive is 4TB, that means you can have 2 VHDs of 2TB created on it. That, in turn, means that you can backup up to 4TB of data from your data storage drives (with a maximum of 2TB for any one drive). That’s a theoretical maximum, since Microsoft also recommend having some free space in the VHDs to handle incremental backups.]
With this in mind, I have defined my server backup data set to consist only of what I think of as critical data: the server system itself, the client backup data, and a few other folders. This all adds up to around 610GB of data. I have two 1TB drives that I have designated as backup drives in the WHS 2011 system. I have a single-bay ICY Dock enclosure, and I rotate the two drives between the enclosure and an offsite storage location. I take backups twice daily, at 12:00 and 23:00 (this is the default setting for the server backup function of WHS 2011).
The first time I used each drive in the system, a full copy of the server backup dataset was written to the drive. This meant that each drive then had around 320 GB free capacity. After the first backup, only changes to the data are recorded in subsequent backups. Each time a backup was made, some of the 320GB free capacity was used up to hold these changes.
It is possible to define a retention policy for client computer backups (that is, how long the client computer backups will be kept before they are deleted and the space reclaimed for newer backups). See the following screenshot showing how the retention policy can be defined.
But the interesting thing is that there is no equivalent setup screen to define the retention policy for server backups. So the question naturally arises: what happens when the backup drives used for the server backups become full?
Over on the WHS forums, some folks say that WHS 2011 will automatically clear out old backups once a backup drive fills up, but others have reported that it doesn’t always happen; thus, it’s a bit unclear.
So I was curious to see what would happen as time went on, and my backup drives got full.
The first thing that happened, about a week ago, was that I received an alert to say that one of my backup drives had less than 10% of free space:
You’ll notice that the only possibilities offered by this alert to resolve the issue are either to replace the drive with a larger one, or to cut down on the size of the server backup. Neither of these options were particularly attractive, and nothing is said about the possibility of deleting older backups. So I thought I would just carry on and see what would happen.
I got to the situation today when drive #1 had less than 6GB free space left. I triggered a further backup manually to see what would happen. The backup was successful, and then I saw that the drive had 320 GB free. WHS 2011 had deleted all the backups from the drive and created a fresh complete backup. Drive #1 then had one backup on it.
That means that drive #1 now holds one server backup, time stamped today (23rd July). Drive #2 currently holds 38 server backups dating back to 14 June (one full backup plus 37 incremental changes). Once drive #2 runs out of space I expect the same thing to happen; all the old backups will be deleted and a new server backup will be taken. At that point, my earliest server backup will be today’s backup (23rd July) on drive #1.
I see one slight quirk in all of this. If I look at the server properties in the WHS 2011 Dashboard, and examine the Backup tab, I see this:
Notice how it is listing backups taken to drive #1 that are now no longer available. If I compare this with the list that is given by the Windows Server Backup screens in the underlying Windows Server 2008 Server Manager (which your average Home User would never see or be aware of), then I see this:
In other words, all the backups taken to drive #1 that were deleted in order to make room for today’s backup have also now been removed from this list. Up until this point, they would have been shown. I would argue that this list is a more accurate reflection of the actual situation than the list shown in the WHS 2011 Dashboard information.
If I then ask WHS 2011 to show me what backups are available for restoring, then it doesgive me an accurate picture:
The dates shown in bold before the 23rd July are for the backups held on drive #2 – it shows that there are no backups available for the 20th and 21st July, for example. There were backups taken on this date, but they were taken to drive #1, and were subsequently deleted today when drive #1 ran out of space.
Depending on where you look in the Dashboard, you will get slightly different answers… Personally, I would prefer the list of backups to reflect the actual state of available backups, rather than state that backups that are no longer available were successful at the time. I don’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security.
Sigh. Murphy’s Law has struck. I wrote earlier in this post:
Once drive #2 runs out of space I expect the same thing to happen; all the old backups will be deleted and a new server backup will be taken.
Well, yesterday, Backup drive #2 ran out of space. And what happened? I got an error, and the backup failed…
Before the backup started, I had 3.1GB free space on the drive, so I was expecting WHS 2011 to realise that there wasn’t enough space for a backup, and to wipe the drive before starting with a complete new backup. After all, that’s what I think it did with drive #1.
No such luck.
Instead, it attempted to do a backup, and I got an alert saying that the scheduled backup did not finish successfully:
Notice that it’s given me an error code 2155348020, and, as I’ve written before:
I love the way that this message simply tosses out the fact that we should view the event log for more information. I think that most Home Users presented with this message would simply think: WTF is the Event log? And they can’t view the Event log via the WHS 2011 Dashboard anyway – you have to be sufficiently IT-savvy to be able to open up a Remote Desktop Connection and then start up the Event Viewer on the server.
Going to the Event Log, I see this message from the Backup application:
The backup operation that started at ‘2011-07-28T10:01:02.660930800Z’ has failed with following error code ‘2155348020’ (Windows Backup failed to create the shadow copy on the storage location.). Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.
The event details are given by a link to a Microsoft online help page for Windows Server 2008 R2, and it’s clearly written for IT support staff. To a Home User, it might as well be written in Martian.
Admittedly, it is fairly clear what the problem is – the backup drive does not have enough room to store the shadow copy – but the resolution doesn’t seem possible. As we’ve already established at the beginning of this saga, WHS 2011 has no way for a Home User to clear out old server backups, we seem to have to be reliant on WHS 2011 deleting the backups itself. And if it doesn’t do this, as appears to be the case here, we’re screwed.
A couple of other oddities I noticed with this failed backup. Even though it was reported as unsuccessful in the Alert viewer and here:
… if I click on the “View details…” button shown above, I am told that while the backup was unsuccessful, it does seem to have successfully backed up all the drives and folders that it was supposed to:
Something else that is a bit odd. I said that, going in to this backup, the drive had 3.1GB free. Now it has 9.6GB free. I’m not sure what to make of that…
I kicked off a manual backup of the server using drive #2, and this time it completed successfully. I’ve done a mixture of scheduled and manual backups since then, and they’ve all completed successfully. The amount of free space left on the backup drive varies between 0.7GB and 6GB. It’s currently at 1.7GB.
What it’s not doing, as was the case with drive #1, is to clear out all the old backups and start again.
I think I’ll just leave drive #2 in the system for the moment and see what happens. I would prefer that the system behave in predictable ways. I am unsettled by the fact that it seems to behave according to its own rules. Rules that Microsoft have never bothered to define. Perhaps, like me, they don’t know what they are…
Oh well, hitting a brick wall again. Last night’s backup proceeded without a problem, and I ended up with only 1.2GB free space on the backup drive. So I thought that when today’s backup kicked off at noon, WHS 2011 would have the nous to realise that it would need to clear out all the backups from the drive and start again (as it had done with drive #1).
Nope – I just got another error:
I then tried to see if doing a manual backup would clear out the backup drive…
Nope, the same error.
What now? I suppose I can try removing the drive from the server backup function and then re-attaching it as though it were a totally fresh drive… Right, so I select backup drive #2 and choose the “Remove the hard drive from Server Backup” task:
That then kicks off the Server Backup wizard…
Perhaps it’s just me, but this strikes me as a trifle confusing – I just want to remove the backup drive from the Server Backup, why do I have to trudge through this wizard again. Oh well, onwards…
Right, so I suppose I need to choose the “Change Server Backup settings” option. So let’s do that…
I assume that to remove backup drive #2, I will need to uncheck the first checkbox. As an aside, note how the offline backup drive (backup drive #1) is not given its user-friendly name (WHS Data Backup #1), but the internal gobbledegook that Windows Server 2008 R2 knows it by: \\?\Volume(b14d1287-95dd-11e0-a8fc-002354da5014). I’m sure this is perfectly obvious to your average Home User, of course.
I uncheck the first checkbox and click “Next”, only to be presented with this:
Well, yes, I know that; and the purpose of telling me this is? So I click on “OK”, and am returned to the screen before. Since I’m trying to remove the damn drive, I click on “Next” only to get this error message again. I’m now just bouncing back and forth between these two screens.
Sigh.
Perhaps the way out of this mess is to:
You’ll note that even though WHS 2011 is telling me that it’s going to remove drive #1 from Server Backup, I have to do this in order to remove drive #2… Make sense? No, I thought not. OK, here we go…
Here we are back at the screen that caused the problem the last time around. Now, it’s backup drive #1 that’s online, and backup drive #2 (which is now offline and has its own gobbledegook name showing) that I need to deselect in order to remove it from the backup destination:
This time, I make it to the next screen, which has the existing name of backup drive #1 already filled in:
Clicking “Next” gets me to the schedule screen:
Then I get to choose what I want backed up (it’s already filled in with my last choices):
And at last I reach the confirmation screen, where I see that backup drive #2 is now removed.
Remember, that I started off from a screen that offered to remove backup drive #1 from Server backup; however, the design of WHS 2011 leads you into a dead-end if you assume that this is what it will remove. Did no-one spot this problem before product release?
It seems a very roundabout way of removing a backup drive. I also have my suspicions that we are not out of the woods yet.
Just because I’ve removed a backup drive from the backup schedule doesn’t necessarily mean that WHS 2011 has forgotten about it. Sure enough, if I start the server restore wizard, and look at available backups, it shows me backups that were taken on to drive #2:
So now, if I reformat backup drive #2 and add it back into the server backup schedule, will WHS 2011 continue to think that these backups are still available?
I added backup drive #2 into the server dock. WHS 2011 does not show it as an available disk:
Let’s try and add it back into the Server Backup schedule… I start the Customize Server Backup wizard and reach the “select the backup destination” screen. At first, I didn’t see the backup drive, only after I checked the “Show all disks that can be used as backup disks” did it appear as the first item in this screenshot:
I checked it (to add it into the list of backup destinations) and clicked “Next”.
FINALLY – I get a screen that acknowledges that WHS 2011 knows that this drive has been used for backups before:
I choose “No” and get a confirmation screen:
I chose “Yes” and got to give a name to the disk. I chose “WHS Data backup drive #2a”, since I’m curious to see whether WHS 2011 has now deleted all references to “WHS Data backup drive #2” from its list of available backups. Let’s check by starting the Server Restore wizard:
WHAT? Excuse me, I have backups taken on drive #1 available, don’t tell me you’ve deleted everything?
I hurriedly put in backup drive #1, and start the Server Restore wizard again. This time, I get further, and elect to choose the backup I want to restore from. If I choose a backup that was taken onto backup drive #1 (the one that’s currently plugged into the system), I get confirmation that the backup is online and available (in this case, the backup of 24th July at 23:00):
But, what’s this? WHS 2011 is still claiming that backups are available from backup drive #2 (e.g. the backup of 29 July at 23:00):
True enough, it’s saying that it’s offline, because the drive isn’t plugged into the system, but it’s still claiming that it’s available. Oh no it isn’t, says I, because you’ve just formatted that drive. Oh yes it is, replies WHS 2011…
Sometimes I feel as though I’m taking part in a Panto with WHS 2011…
So, to summarise. Removing a drive from Server Backup is not straightforward – the task design is flawed and leads you to a dead end. You can get WHS 2011 to reformat a backup drive, but it won’t go the extra mile with you and remove the previous entries for the deleted backups from its internal database. So it will quite happily lie to you about what backups are available…
Wonderful.
Found your blog and am reading your WHS articles. I’m surprised by some of the oddities that you have experienced. Frankly most of them don’t bother me – as I don’t bother with backups of most of my data (usually have redundant copies of the big stuff that doesn’t change anyways). Your article about media sharing and specifically the metadata tags being overwritten was surprising (again my music library is a mess – and most of my metadata is a mess – so in this case WHS messing with stuff isn’t going to make me too sad – unless it gets it horribly wrong).
I’ve had no problems with the streaming – actually been an awesome feature for me. I had my share of problems with HP’s MSS add-ins – so WHS 2011 has actually been lower stress for me, with more working OOTB thank HP’s solutions (Twonky was a pain!). The speed over WHSv1 DE (which was relatively speedy at first, but became a dog over a few years) is much appreciated – and for me as a developer – IIS7/.NET 4.0 + all the nice add-ins of IIS 7 are a god-send (Application Request Routing means I can proxy to my internal VM server/SVN server).
Of course I’ve only just started using WHS 2011 (got it for $50 from newegg) – so I’m sure it’ll make me mad at some point – but so far – less stress than HP MSS 3.0 software (the dashboard doesn’t take 8 minutes to load!).
Aaron, thanks for the comments. If the issues don’t bother you overmuch then that’s fine. They irritate the hell out of me! Actually, I’m in the process of updating this post, because my backups have now failed. Watch this space for more ranting…
Oh gosh – that sucks. Yeah WHS has always been a bit quirky. Again – so far I’ve been impressed with the media streaming features (no problems yet).
Yeah the backup stuff looked good. The WHSv1 system seemed to work well for me, definitely going to be watching you’re post, since there is a subset of my data that needs to be backed up on a regular basis.
Currently I’m in the process of setting up a Windows software RAID-5 array with 3 1TB disks… currently in hour 18 of the initial ‘build’ LOL (about 80% done).
Great article Geoff,
I have made the switch to 2011 and have also recieved the drive full response,
I am planning to pull the drives with the current backups out of the cycleso as to keep the backups intacked,
Then put a new 2tb into the backup set, i think this makes sense ?
Thanks for the positive response, Greg. As far as I know, you should be able to retire your current drives and add a new drive into the set for new backups. It should work.
[…] 3: There are other issues with the Server Backup function in WHS 2011 that I explore in depth here. Sigh. GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); […]
Hi Geoff,
I just found your well documented WHS11 server backup experiences via google. I have similar experiences and views, but I’ve now got myself stuck …. perhaps you have some insight ? Although WHS11 Dashboard shows successful backup and no server or client issues, I’ve now lost all records of server backup is I try to look into details via dashboard, BUT if I use the server2008 tool in the set of Administrative Tools “windows server backup” than all backups are there and in order. This happened following a power-out of a few seconds a couple of nights ago which seems to have screwed up dashboard’s ability to communicate with server2008 backup data in the SQL database.
Another peculiarity ….. I “christened my server” BrosterWHS11 at install and that is how it is known on the network and indeed how it looks in some of the property sheets of the system, but now on the Network (netbios name) it is just called “SERVER”. Everthing other than these two oddities seems to be OK but I’d like to go back to where I was a couple of days ago, but without backups of c: non-existent I’m not sure what to do next …..
Any clues from your experiences ?
Regards, David Broster (Sevilla, Spain)
David, thanks for your comments. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any clues to offer to help resolve your issues. Perhaps you could try posting them as two questions to the wider community of WHS 2011 users, either over at the We Got Served forums or at the Microsoft WHS 2011 forum.
I’ve got 4 drives in my HP MicroServer running WHS 2011 – 2x 1TB and 2x 2TB HDD’s and I have 1 of each configured as Backup Drives but the stupid WHS2011 backup only ever uses the 2TB drive and then complains it’s is low on space despite having a perfectly good 1TB drive sitting there empty.
Any Ideas? (yes it is selected for use by my backup config)
Derek, I think that what is happening is that WHS 2011 will only ever use one backup drive at a time, and won’t backup more than 2TB in any case. It certainly doesn’t span drives so that once your 2TB drive is full during a server backup it will automatically start adding backup data to the 1TB drive.
So presumably, it’s currently using the 2TB drive for backup and that’s becoming full, so it will start complaining about being low on backup space. Because you’ve got two drives permanently connected as backup drives, I suggest you just let it run and see what happens. It may be once the 2TB drive is full, then it will switch over to use the 1TB drive in place of the 2TB drive, but if it does this, then if your backup data amounts to more than 1TB, I think you’ll get a failure once it starts using the 1TB drive.
The issue is that the whole WHS 2011 server backup design is poorly designed…
I am seriously regretting the hell I went through to upgrade to 2011. I am having just as many issues and WHS 2011 is starting to look like Windows ME to me.
Angela, I must admit that WHS v1 “just worked” for me. The only reason I upgraded to WHS 2011 was because of the Server Backup function (WHS v1 only had shared folder backup). Mind you, the Server Backup function in WHS 2011 is dreadfully limited.
I think that’s indicative of WHS 2011 – the design feels incomplete; it doesn’t meet the needs of the target market; the online documentation and marketing material are badly written and contain numerous errors (which are still not fixed) and it has presented many teething problems on installation and running to more users than I would have expected.
WHS 2011 does not feel like a second generation product to me – it’s not much of an advance over WHS v1, and in some areas, it’s a step backwards.
Check out my other WHS 2011 posts – most of them are rants. Not what I would have have wished.
Hello all,
I posted once before (above). I’m running WHS11 on an HP Proliant Microserver with about 1.7TB of client backups and shares on a couple of 2TB drives. I decided to create a single 3TB partition on a new drive and use it for server backup. The 2TB limitation seems not so important since I’m already at 2.2TB used and all seems fine including a recent experimental system drive recovery to a 60Gig SSD. The server backups increment at about 10GB/day so it will another couple of months or so until the 3TB drive is full. My previous experience with a full 2TB drive was much as reported by Geoff and I got awfully consumed as to what was actually happening, so I just put the drive in a cupboard, since it seemed I could restore from it using the native Server 2008 tools (been there, done that).
Thought you should know about the 3TB experiment …..
Regards, Dave Broster (Sevilla, es)
Dave, thanks for adding this info. I must admit, I’m curious to see how this pans out for you. Even though you are using a 3TB drive for the backup, WHS 2011 is supposed to be using the VHD format to make backups with, and this definitely has a 2TB limit… So I’m somewhat surprised when you say that you are already over the 2TB limit… Keep us informed about what happens; thanks.
Nice blog and it helps confirm my fears about WHS 2011’s backup limitations. My 2 TB external drive has just reached the “less than 10% space remaining” point and I suspect once the drive is full, all the server backups will be toast.
On another topic, I have found a couple of significant problems with the streaming capabilities of WHS 2011 (and actually Windows 7 too).
My database of media files for DLNA streaming got corrupted somehow and the some of the files became unavailable to my receiving DLNA devices. I have a couple of DLNA Blu-Ray players that one day could not see my library of Picture files on the WHS 2011 machine. The database seems to be tied into Windows Media Players Library system and for whatever reason the Blu-Ray player could not see any picture files on the server. This corruption occured on my Windows 7 machines too. Rebuilding the library on a Win7 machine seems to have fixed the problem for that particular computer, but it did not fix it on the WHS2011 machine and I still can’t see any picture files on that computer.
The Video streaming on WHS2011 is very poor. Trying to stream standard res DVD’s that I have converted to H.264 files is frequently very pixellated and blurry. I assume this is due to WHS2011 transcoding on the fly. I really don’t see why WHS2011 has to transcode at all as my Blu-Ray player can play the H.264 files just fine from a directly connected flash drive or burned DVD.
Fortunately, I found about about Serviio (http://www.serviio.org/) which is FREE downloadable DLNA server software that will runs on Mac, Linux and Windows (including WHS 2011). It has a very nice Media Library management function and streams videos PERFECTLY with no quality degradation. It says it transcodes the video on the fly too, but if it is transcoding it is using a MUCH more efficient algorithm than WHS 2011. It streams Music, Photos, Videos and has hardware profiles for many common DLNA devices (such as my Sony Blu Ray players) and enables features specific to those devices. I’m going to use Serviio as my streaming software on the WHS2011 machine and disable the built in streaming services (Windows Media Player Network Sharing).
Thanks for the comment, Bezoar. Yes, the media library functions of WHS 2011 leave a lot to be desired. Media Services via the Remote Web Access function in particular is very hit and miss. You mention that you rebuilt the library database on one of your Win7 machines – it sounds as though you need to rebuild the library database on your WHS 2011 as well. With regard to video streaming, there’s a video streaming setting in WHS 2011 that you could try adjusting to see if it affects matters. Still, if you’ve stepped over to Serviio, then you probably don’t want to fiddle about with the media services of WHS 2011 any more.
I have to say that, for me, I can use the base services of WHS 2011 for media over our home network without problems – but I’ve given up on using them via Remote Web Access; just too many issues and problems.
Geoff, I just wanted to leave a note of thanks for this blog and your many helpful posts around the forums. I recently built a new server and moved to WHS 2011 and your posts have helped me past several hurdles.
While I can understand a software product having bugs, I am very disappointed that six months or so after the release of WHS 2011 we still don’t AFAIK have even a technical bullentin addressing the backup issues. It makes me feel like MS has lost their way.
Before reading your post here I thought I knew exactly how I wanted WHS 2011 to do server backups. But now I’m not so sure. Below I’ll list some of my thoughts and a few questions that have arisen as a result of your experience.
1. I definitely think we should be able to backup to multiple HD’s in a rotation scheme. At its simplest, this would be two drives, one that is in the server and the other that is offsite. One thing I noticed about several of your attempted work-arounds is you were required to have both drives on hand. That would be very inconvenient, if not impractical in an ongoing basis. I would expect to retrieve the offsite backup if I were required to do a restore, but not when I am just performing routine management of the backup scheme.
2. “Back in the day” as they say, when I was backing up to tape I had a Daily (incremental) tape, four Weekly (full backup) tapes, and 3 Monthly (full backup) tapes, for a total of 8 tapes in the scheme. But with WHS 2011 it seems what we are trying to do is keep a full backup and a series of incrementals on EACH backup media (disk). I want to rotate my disks between the server and the offsite storage every week, so if I loose the server and its onboard backup (fire, theft, etc.) I have a full backup and incrementals that gets me to within a week of the loss.
3. Given that, how would I want to manage the refresh of the base (full) backup on each of the disks? Perhaps disk one gets initialized at the beginning of odd quarters, disk two at the beginning of even quarters? That way I could recover to at least 3 months ago at any point in time.
4. Of course, WHS 2011 is incapable of doing any of this at the moment. All of this has me wondering if there are any decent 3rd-party backup products that could be used in the WHS 2011 environment.
Jerry
Jerry, thanks for your comments and questions. I’ll reply to your points tomorrow, when I have had time to get my thoughts in order. Until then…
Jerry, with regard to your point (1): I had that problem of needing to have both backup drives present when I was trying out server backup using external drives connected via USB. When I eventually moved over to using removable drives in an ICY Dock enclosure, that issue went away. So now, I am able to rotate hard drives.
With regard to your point (2) – as far as I can see, you are right: each of my backup drives holds its own full backup and incrementals. They are NOT spanned across drives in any way.
For point (3), the drives don’t seem to get (re)initialised on a regular periodic basis (e.g. every quarter), but some time after they get full. I say “some time after”, because they do seem to hobble along for a while when they have only a few GB left free, and then suddenly they will be reinitialised and a new full backup will be taken. What triggers this, I have no idea… I suppose if you had three drives, you could use one to take a backup every three months, and use the other two on a weekly rotation basis.
For point (4), I’m sure that there are products out there, but I haven’t bothered to track any down, since I can live with using a combination of the Server Backup for critical data and SyncToy (or Allway Sync) for non-critical data. One thing to check would be whether the products work as an Add-in to the WHS 2011 Dashboard. I suspect that most of the available products will run with their user interface on the Administrator Desktop, rather than in the Dashboard.
Geoff, your responses to my points 2 and 3 considerably ease my concerns and I’m going to start down the same path you have blazed. Specifically, knowing that each disk has the full and incrementals is helpful. It would be nice if WHS 2011 gave us more control over when it reinitialises the server backup drives, but I can live with what you described for now.
I’ll be sure to post back here if I discover anything new, or if I get things so screwed up I need sympathy and/or consultation ;-). Thanks again for your insights.
Jerry
Geoff, I see that Cloudberry now supports block level backups to local storage and it is a WHS 2011 plugin, available for $29. Have you looked at this? See here for more info: http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2011/11/11/whs-add-in-update-cloudberry-backup-updated-to-version-2-5/
Jerry, no, I haven’t looked at it closely for a while. The last time I looked, their focus was primarily on Cloud storage, which I found horrendously expensive if you want to use it in a serious way.
If they are now starting to improve the functionality of the local storage capability, then I should take another look.
Thanks.
Geoff … thanks again for all of your great research … Did you know that your snowflakes drifted all the way down your web page? I knew that you were looking for something else to do. 🙂
Anyway … unfortunately my experiences are very, very similar to yours. I agree with you that “WHS 2011 does not feel like a second generation product to me – it’s not much of an advance over WHS V1, and in some areas, it’s a step backwards.” It almost appears that Microsoft fired the V1 team, and put some college grads on 2011 … it just does not appear to be well designed and tested. Maybe the underpinnings are better … but the UI and the “home server” operation is way more complex to operate than V1.
Anyway … my request for assistance is …
I don’t understand why backing up my C:\ (system) drive (28GB) and my D:\ (client backups) (202GB) – a total of 230GB … uses 700GB on my Server Backup drive.
In your write-up, (I think that) you indicate that WHS 2011 is doing server incremental backups (incrementals of what?) … I thought that the client backups were incremental backups (from my understanding of V1 … each daily backup just stores the differences from yesterday – and additionally common files between client computers are only backed up once – which explains why the client backup is so small)?
So is WHS 2011 it doing incrementals of the incrementals? Why would it do that? When I did manual backups of my WHS V1 system, the 230GB backup would have been 230GB on the backup drive.
From your experience knowledge can you clarify why 230GB of data uses 700GB of backup space?
OK, I will do my best to explain what I think is happening, but that’s not to say that this is the real reason, of course…
You’ve got two backup operations going on: the client PC backups being taken to the server, and the server backup itself, which includes the D: drive (where the client PC backups are held). Both of these use a combination of full and incremental backup operations. That is to say, the first backup in a sequence is a full one-to-one copy (sort of – see the note that follows), and subsequent backups are only copies of the changes to the original. I say “sort of” because while the server backup is looking at things at a file and folder basis, the client PC backup looks at file clusters – i.e. a more fine-grained view of the contents of the client PC drives.
Let’s simplify things for the moment by just considering the server backups. As you say, these will be the contents of your C: and D: drives on your server, which at any one time equals, let’s say, 230 GB. So, the first server backup is a full backup of 230GB. Subsequent to that, your WHS 2011 server, by default, will take two backups every 24 hours. If these were to be full backups, then in less than two days, you would have exceeded the 700GB that you are seeing on your backup drive (230 + 230 [day 1] + 230 + 230 [day 2], etc.). However, the server backup uses a full+incremental technique, so following the first full backup of 230GB, the subsequent backups are only of those files that have changed, Unless you are totally changing the content on your server every day, these changed files will be a fraction of the static 230GB. Nonetheless, over time, these changes will mount up.
There is a significant difference between the server backup function of WHS 2011 and the shared folder backup function of WHS v1. And that is that in v1, (as far as I’m aware) you could only restore the last state of the shared folders. However, in WHS 2011, you can restore to any previous timestamped state of the server. That’s because of the way, and the number, of the incremental backup snapshots are taken and held. This ability to restore to any point previous in time back to the first full backup means that more information has to be held, and this – I think – accounts for the 700GB being taken up. WHS 2011 will just carry on taking two backups of the server every day until the physical space available to it on your backup drive is filled. At that point it will attempt to prune out old backups.
I think that this is what is going on with your server. The more changes that occur over time (either on your client PCs or in the shared folders on the server), the more incremental data needs to be stored on the backup drive to handle the timestamped restore feature, and this will also contribute to the total amount held on the drive
Geoff,
Do you not sleep? 🙂
I generally agree with your analysis (as I have a 700GB backup) … but …
My C:\ Server drive should not be changing (hardly) at all (28GB) …
And my D:\ client backups are already incremental backups (surely we are not doing inremental backups of incremental backups).
Another point is that I have shadow copies turned off on the D:\drive … but even so, why would the server be making incremental backups of the client incremental backups? I can restore to any file in any incremental backup (can’t I?).
My C:\ drive should be stable at 28GB. My D:\ client backups should change by MBs per day (unless I do some phenomenal amount of changes – which I am not).
So I still think that my server backup should be 28GB (C)+ 202 GB (D) = 230GB … After all … these are all my daily backups … what other files can be created from these?
Hmmm … but then you mentioned shared folders – which I did not mention because I didn’t think that they were related. Here’s why …
My shared folders are on an E:\ drive which I have not put in the “Server backup” configuration (I also have an F:\ drive where I back E:\ up using a separate process – another discussion). See the diagrams (mmm … can’t upload … but they show C:\ and D:\ only being backed up).
So I maintain my confused status … My C:\ (system) drive is 28GB and basically stable. My D:\ (client backups) is 202GB with MB changes already being incrementally backed up inside the client backups. Shared folders are not on C:\ or D:\ and are not supposed to be being backed up. So I should have a total of 230GB on the backup drive – expanding a little each day.
But I am burning close to 700GB on my Server Backup drive – and it doesn’t make any sense to me. Certainly a lot more confusing than WHS V1 … at this time I am almost ready to go back to manually backup up the server like I did in WHS V1.
Thanks for letting me rant … If you have any other clarifications based on me not backing up my shared folders … and not having shadows on D/E/F … feel free to enlighten me 🙂
Oh … and of course … now (at 22:58 EST) I have the “Free space is low in Server Backup” warning … and I can’t even tell what is in my danged backup 😦
Er, yes, your server backup *is* taking “incremental backups of incremental backups”. It’s what it does… If you RDP into your server desktop, you will be able to look inside the folder used to hold the Client PC backups. In my case, I see a whole series of files with names of the form DATA.4096.x.DAT, where x is a number running from 0 to 117. Most of the files are 4GB in size, most were created back in May 2011, and all of them get modified every time the Client PC Backup runs. So then the Server Backup will take incrementals of these files for its own backup.
I agree that there probably shouldn’t be large changes happening, but the server backup will just carry on filling up your 700GB until it’s full. It sounds as though this is happening faster than you expected, as though something is causing large changes in your server, which then have to be backed up.
You can take a look at what’s going on with your server backup. RDP into the server destop, and start the Server Manager – it’s the icon pinned to the Taskbar between the IE and CMD icons. Under the Storage section of Server Manager, you’ll find Windows Server Backup – use this to browse your backups and look at how your backup disc is being used.
Well … this is just wild … I composed another response … but then looked at some more data. So this is my current thinking – which, if you have time, please feel free to clarify some more. Also feel free to tell me to stop monopolizing your blog whenever you like. My intention is not to correct you … I am looking for clarification for my understanding. 🙂
I looked at my Client Computer Backups folder (199GB). As you stated, it looks like virtually every file in the folder was updated today – certainly every one of the 4GB .dat files is updated.
So are you suggesting (or telling me) that for the full server backup Microsoft:
1) Does an initial server backup of all the .dat files … and then …
2) Twice a day
i) Does a differential comparison between yesterday’s and today’s .dat files … and then …
ii) Backs that differential dataset up to the Server Backup disk? (hence the expansion to 700GB!)
So Microsoft (as you stated) is doing incremental backups of the incremental backups – ouch!
So have I got a (close to) correct understanding now … or am I still off beam? 😐
So assuming that I have now got the picture (which I am not certain of) … Microsoft would use this method to:
1) Minimize the amount of data being backed up twice daily
2) Minimize the time taken for the twice daily backup (because my method of backing up the whole client folder would take overwriting 202GB twice per day as virtually every file changes)
3) But using this “incremental backup of the backups” method:
i) Burns disk space relentlessly
ii) Makes it very difficult to determine if the backups will work (I don’t know how often you played with Symantec Ghost and similar imaging systems, but they were notorious for having a single file corrupted and that would destroy a complete backup)
So I fear that I am now on a “snipe hunt” (I threw that in because I know that you like to use obscure quotes). I wonder what it would have taken to build the incremental backup file structure such that only a few .dat files would change daily. Then “my” complete backup scheme would work in minimal time … and minimal disk space.
And now I guess that we are trusting that this imperfect backup scheme (which you described in this blog) has got our data … safe and secure. And when the system erratically “clears down” the server backup disk to recover disk space, we can trust it implicitly. So now I am really nervous – given the other anomalies in the system. 😦
Thanks for humoring me.
Well, let’s say I’m strongly suggesting that the mechanism used by the Server Backup is as I’ve described (and as you summarise). I’m not telling you that this is the case, because I’m not privy to the internal design documents used by the WHS 2011 team.
On the assumption that the mechanism is this way, then the points 1,2,and 3 that you list are valid. Point 3 is the tricky one, of course.I have never had to do a full restore of the server, but I have had occasional need to restore individual files and folders from a particular timestamped backup. The restore process has so far worked for me. I think it’s also worth pointing out that WHS 2011 is simply using the underlying Windows Server 2008 R2 backup mechanisms, which have been used in hundreds and thousands of Enterprise systems for their backups on a daily basis. I would think that the risks are fairly minimal these days as a result. While Murphy’s Law is still valid, I’m not really losing any sleep over it in this particular instance.
10-4 … Thanks for all of the useful information. FYI … I did do a full Server system disk restore on my WHS 2011 system a month or so ago … it did work (pretty well).
I guess that I will back off and let the system roll as is – and try not to worry about it :-).
Signing off … for now …
Hi Geoff, I posted before when I was also somewhat mystified with the server backup regime. Clients are backed up in blocks so that in the case of multiple clients that have similar operating systems and applications installed, only copy of the block is written on the server – along with a map of which client uses the block – it works perfectly well for me and 4 clients at home and grows in total size roughly proportional to the changes / additions of clients as far as I can see from my experience.
For the server backup ….. a few new facts emerge (mainly from reading Microsoft stuff). Each hard-disc has its own image in the back-up along with extra stuff to allow bare-metal recovery. The 2TB limit is PER DRIVE or drive image for the VHD image format used in the backup. I put my shared folders across 3 physical discs each split into smaller drive partitions all less than 2TB each. Since the individual VHD images cannot exceed 2TB this is the only restriction in terms of the target back-up disc. Hence my 3TB server backup works fine and is now almost full. The clean-up management works on the individual VHD’s and when they are reaching their capacity limit (i.e. 2TB). You have to try quite hard to force this to demonstrate it’s OK, but I did it last week by moving my big folders onto a single 2TB drive until it was 90% full, and the corresponding VHD struggled and started to clean backups. As mentioned all this is just the standard fascility of Server 2008. THe biggest confusion is when you start to look at the underlying command line tools to manage the backups, systemstatebackups and shadowcopies. Then you need a brain the size of a planet to figure out what to do (if anything).
So that leaves me with two thoughts …… (i) it would be nice if someone competent would write an add-in to give a GUI (WHS simplicity) interface to help better understand the serverbackup set. The second thought (ii) …. I’m in the process of moving to an SSD, actually it doesn’t matter whether it’s SSD or not, you can only do a bare-metal rebuild onto discs the same size or bigger, irrespective of how much space you occupied on the discs. Hmm …. there seems to be no way to compact yourself into a nice operating system space, since the restriction above is at the physical not partition level. So then comes the brilliant idea of a clean install, but then how can you migrate your client backups, your server backup …. since everything is coded into disk identities, it simply doesn’t seem to work (so far) .,… I’ve tried lots of nice simple cheats. Its easy to cheat with the data ….. (unplug real data discs, replace with empty discs, move the shared folders and swap back the discs – voila. But this doesn’t work for the clients or the server backups which are catalogues (I think) in an SQL database somewhere in the heart of the Server2008 with no indications how to export or import the catalogue data migration is tough.
Any thoughts ?
David
David, thanks for this. Interesting. The bit that leapt out at me is that you say that the 2TB limit is PER DRIVE. Thus, you are saying that, providing my backup drive is big enough, I could have multiple VHD files on it, each being up to 2TB in size; e.g. with a 4TB drive, I could have two 2TB VHDs held on it when using the WHS 2011 server backup..
That hasn’t been my understanding up until now. I had thought that the WHS 2011 server backup utility would only create a single VHD on a backup drive. This VHD can hold multiple virtual discs, but since the 2TB limit is being driven by the VHD format itself, and the backup utility only creates a single VHD file, I’m still hitting the 2TB limit of data that can be backed up from my server.
As I say, interesting…
Geoff,
I continue to try to get more facts on backup … I have some questions for you about your setup if you have some time … I am assuming that you still have two server backup drives:
a. How are they connected? USB, Firewire or eSATA?
b. From my research … eSATA will not work well for server backup as WHS 2011 has no drivers for eSATA and hence it is difficult to swap out? Is that your understanding? I can uninstall the drive from the Device Manager … but that is painful.
c. How do you swap your drives out? Do you just unplug them (sounds dangerous)? Do you safely remove them? Some other method – please clarify? If your hardware has a “disconnect and unplug” switch, what would you suggest us mere mortals with USB drives do?
d. Windows probably recognizes the drive when it is plugged in. Does WHS 2011 recognize the drive as a server backup drive automatically when it is swapped in? If not, what do you do to have WHS 2011 acknowledge that it is a backup drive? Do you run through the WHS 2011 wizard every time?
Hi dszigeti, the answers to your questions are:
a) None of the above. I’m using an internal ICY Dock enclosure that takes standard SATA HDDs. This is just connected to a SATA port on the motherboard.
b) Since I need hot-swap capability for the ICY Dock, I’m running SATA in AHCI mode, rather than IDE emulation mode. You need to select this in your BIOS.
c) Yes, you just yank the USB cable when you want to disconnect. I agree it sounds dangerous, having grown up on earlier versions of Windows where you needed to disconnect hardware safely, but it’s your only option. WHS v1 had an explicit “disconnect drives” command in the console – that’s gone in the WHS 2011 Dashboard.
d) If your external drive is already formatted, then WHS 2011 will add it as a storage drive automatically – not as a backup drive. I *think* that you can use the “Show all disks that can be used as Backup disks” checkbox in the Server Backup wizard to get WHS 2011 to offer it to you as a backup drive. If that doesn’t work, then you need to use the Disk Management tool in Server Manager to delete the partition(s) on the external drive. Then the wizrd will work, and show you the drive. Once it has been added as a backup disk, then WHS 2011 will recognise it every time it’s plugged in automatically. That’s how I can swap my backup disks without effort.
Geoff … Thanks again for the info … I remember that you mentioed the ICY somewhere before.
Hmmm … this leaves me with more (possibly rhetorical) questions though ….
I am running AHCI (I think) but Microsoft indicates the “safe removal” of eSATA in not available – and that’s what I see on my system. See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961078.
For your setup, I guess we know when th backups are occurijng so pulling the drives out when outside of the backup times might be OK. But I would be worried about pulling the drives in the middle of a backup. You could try the Device Manager uninstall – that does work for my eSATA drive.
As I want to move my drives offsite I also want them encrypted … so that will add another interesting wrinkle. But I am thinking of TrueCrypt automounting the Server Backup drives. I’ll inform you how that goes.
dszigeti – that Microsoft KB warning applies to Vista and Windows Server 2008. However, WHS 2011 is running on Windows Server 2008 R2 – a later OS, so I am pretty confident that you’re OK.
You’re quite right that it certainly doesn’t sound like a good idea to pull a drive when a backup is in progress – that’s just asking for trouble.
There’s no access to the Device Manager within the Dashboard – you have to RDP into the server desktop – and this defeats the whole idea of having a “Home” server in the first place. Really, all the admin operations should be available via the Dashboard. The fact that many of us end up using RDP to get to the underlying server OS is, to me, a sign of failure in the design… but that’s another story.
There’s a whole thread on encryption on the We Got Served forums, might be a useful read:
http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/19783-encryption-on-drives-for-physical-security/
Geoff, thanks for pointing out that I am on R2 … but still, my Thermaltake ST0005U eSATA external drive enclosure does not allow a safe removal. I will recheck that I have AHCI set in the BIOS … and maybe the Device Manager as well.
I agree with your comment that having to RDP into the box as much as I (we) do is not good. I do run a home built, headed unit … so it is not a “problem” but, as you elude to, a flaw in the design.
I also find that Advanced Admin Console 2011 is a very useful addin and I think that it gives you access to the Device Manager thru the dashboard.
I’ll check out the link for encryption … thanks.
Technically, there’s no need to use the “Safely Remove Hardware” tray icon because by default, WHS turns on the “Quick Removal” policy (i.e. disables write caching) for external drives.You just have to make sure there’s no activity to them (easy for backup disks since if a backup isn’t running, nothing should be writing to them). A bit disconcerting at first, but I’ve done this for months with no ill effect.
Although I’m not familiar with WHS 2011, I do know that it uses the same backup as plain old Windows Server 2008 R1 and R2 (and Small Business Server 2008 and 2011). Personally, I like using a separate PCIe SATA controller card with a Silicon Image chipset, as they seem to support hot-plugging quite well.
As for running out of disk space on your backups, generally the way the backup works is this:
– First time backup to a new drive: Full backup
– Subsequent backups to same drive: Incremental backup unless either
a) A crapton of data changes between backups (something like 10% of the total data being backed up) or
b) the shadow copy gets lost somehow
Once the drive gets low on space, it will delete the oldest backup copies to make room for new ones…unless deleting all the incremental copies still won’t provide enough space to finish the backup…then you’ll get an error.
Killer B … Thanks for your comments.
Well I did make some progress since the last post … I am using a small program called HotSwap (free) that allows me to safely disconnect the drive. I also have found (but not tested) a program called Zentimo ($) that may also allow me to swap the drive out.
When I moved the drive to an external enclosure (it was internal) the drive would not spin down – it was always very hot. I unchecked drive caching, and now the drive seems to spin down correctly and is normally cool/cold, except after backups.
Even though my complete server + clients backups are only 300GB … my server backup drive (750GB) is full and continues to warn me of such. It seems to clear down space and maintain the backups automatically.
I am still not sure that I like the idea that the server backup drive is making incrementals of the incrementals. As I previously posted, if the server only needs 300GB to back up my systems, I would expect that the backup drive should only need 300GB. So I am not ecstatic about this method … even though I may understand why they do it – see my December 11 post.
I have not had enough time to engage an “offsite disk” TrueCrypt backup yet. One potential problem that I don’t understand is how to use an encrypted drive for recovery? When Windows goes to read the drive is will see only encrypted data (garbage) … so I am (theoretically) working the problem in my (very few) spare cycles. One solution would be to decrypt the drive … Another would be to copy the “open” drive data (but I am not sure that the newly created disk would have the correct format).
Hi Geoff, with some research, I discovered the commands needed to delete old backups off the currently mounted server backup disk. I alternate between two USB-attached disks for my server backups. When I swap disks, I run a command file to the DISKSHADOW utility to clear out the last 30 days of old backups (essentially by deleting the oldest 60 shadow files). While this deletes the backups, the catalog doesn’t get updated until the next backup runs. Here’s a summary of how the commands work:
1) Login to your WHS server using Remote Desktop Connection.
2) Launch Accessories > System Tools > Windows Server Backup
3) Under All Backups, click on View Details and note the GUIDs for your backup volumes. For my two disks, these are:
WHSBACKUP1: \\?\Volume{cfc9f0c2-b32e-11e0-a456-78acc0f79053}
WHSBACKUP2: \\?\Volume{38f0c0ef-b389-11e0-9ecc-806e6f6e6963}
4) In a command prompt, launch diskshadow, at the prompt, use the “delete shadows oldest” subcommand followed by the GUID of the backup volume. For example, to delete the oldest backup from the currently mounted WHSBACKUP1, issue the subcommand
delete shadows oldest \\?\Volume{cfc9f0c2-b32e-11e0-a456-78acc0f79053}
5) Rinse and repeat for as many oldest backups you want.
There is a subcommand that allows you to delete a specific shadow file, but you have to use the “wbadmin get versions” command to find those. It’s just easier and effective to just kill the oldest ones, because that’s what you want anyway.
Putting the delete shadows oldest subcommands into a file and running them in batch is more convient, e.g: diskshadow /s commands.txt where the subcommands are in commands.txt. Once you’ve created this file, you can run it anytime you want to kill old backups (the GUID’s don’t change) on the currently attached disk without having to jump through the hoops you describe above.
Credit to this article which I found very helpful: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/06/22/backup-version-and-space-management-in-windows-server-backup.aspx
Hope this helps others. I wish Microsoft had put a nice GUI front end to killing these old backup instead of folks having to resort to the command line utilities.
Cheers,
Jon T.
Jon, thanks very much for this. I’ll give it a whirl! As you say, it would be nice to have a GUI front-end; but in its absence, thank you for delving into the command line utilities!
A follow-up: it appears the concept of what’s the “oldest” shadow copy changes only when the catalog gets updated after a backup. I thought I could repeat diskshadow “delete shadows oldest” subcommands to my heart’s content, but the second and subsequent times, it fails which tells me it’s trying to delete the same shadow copy it already deleted the first time you run the command because “oldest” hasn’t changed in the catalog. Sigh. So, I’ll either do one of two things: a) set up a script to run after each backup to delete the oldest shadow copy, or b) develop a clever script to take the output of the “wbadmin get versions” command and shape it into diskshadow “delete shadows id” subcommands to kill the oldest N specific shadow files all at once. Double sigh. In my long-gone unix days, I could write such a script using grep/awk/sed in my sleep.
A follow-up to my follow-up: For several months, I was manually cleaning off old backups when swapping server backup drives to make sure there was enough space for new backups since, as you wrote above, WHS 2011 wasn’t automatically deleting the old ones. Just for giggles, when I swapped the backup drives (I use two) this month, I decided to leave it alone and wait until it filled up to see what would happen. Well, lo and behold, the automatic deletion seems to be working for me now! I still get a warning alert that the drive is almost full, but as the server backups run, the oldest backups are being deleted to make enough space. I wonder if this got fixed somewhere along the line in one of the patch roll-ups. I can’t seem to find anything specific on this via a Google search. I won’t take a gift horse in the mouth 😉
Jon, no, the behavior you describe is what’s supposed to happen, and has been the case since the product was released. The trouble is, that the deletion doesn’t always occur. In the last month, both my backup drives don’t seem to be getting cleaned up, I just get a string of backup failures when the drives are full. I’m having to manually remove the drives from the backup and reintroduce them as fresh drives, so that WHS will wipe them and start again…
Jon, thanks very much for the info. After much research tried this and it worked.
Cheers
Graeme
Geoff, thanks for all this useful info.
Cheers
Graeme
Hi Geoff, very interesting read, and definitely advanced warning :).
I do have one or two questions though, I’ve noticed that WHS2011 insists on formatting the drive where backups will be stored, and subsequently that drive no longer appears as part of the server, so you cannot browse it. For the interests of being Curious I pulled the usb drive and tried it on my windows 7 setup only to be told access denied.
My big concern is that should (and god forbid) the servers hard drives fail, like they did in the Dell poweredge recently :@ and I reset everything up, how would MS then expect me to restore from said backups? Considering that to connect in the first place results in a format.
Now if only there was a way in which to explore the backup drives like ntbackup in 2003 allows you to do.
Hmm scratch that, it would seem that the option to store it on a regular usb hdd that anyone can access is an advanced option. But in finding this I have found you cannot have multiple schedules. EG a daily backup for Data Mon-Sat with a full system backup happening once a week on Sunday, unless this option is pretty well hidden too 😉
Thomas, the drives used for server backups get formatted as VHD. These can be mounted on a Windows 7 system using the Disk Management tool. See http://www.online-tech-tips.com/windows-7/mount-vhd-windows-7/ This way, you can read the drives, and it’s what the server itself does in order to use it in the backup mechanism.
And yes, you are right, you can’t have multiple schedules in the server backup function of the Dashboard. Really, it’s pretty brain-dead…
Ah thank you Geoff, you’ve just taught me something new 🙂
But indeed, multiple backup schedules is a basic concept as I would normally have an unaltered server running, so only data needs backing up, then back the server up entirely once a week or two so I have the latest snapshot including all updates etc.
But thank you Geoff again 🙂
Geoff et al,
Well it seems like you have attracted a lot of interest in this thread … it gets better every day! 🙂 It’s still a pity that Microsoft doesn’t feel that it needs to support us more …
A slightly different subject … but still on “reading disks.” I used to take a backup disk into work as an off-site backup (when I used V1). The disk was encrypted (TrueCrypt) so that others would not be able to see my data. I can’t quite see how I can get this scheme to work with WHS 2011.
I can 1) format a TrueCrypt disk, 2) mount it, 3) have WHS 2011 run backups to it and 4) dismount and 5) take the disk into work. All is good.
My question for you learned lot is …
If my system crashes, I can retrieve the physical disk from work … but after I boot up from the WHS 2001 DVD how can I 1) mount it so that 2) the WHS 2011 can retrieve the recovery data?
Hmmm … I might just answer my own question … comments on better solutions would still be appreciated though …
See Using Bitlocker with server backup
http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/windowshomeserver2011/hh228214.aspx
The Microsoft solution is to decrypt the drive prior to restore … Ouch! that could take a while.
Sorry, Aussie_Z, but you’re venturing into realms that are way beyond my knowledge, so I have no suggestions to offer! Hope something or someone comes through with assistance for you…
I tried BitLocker To Go and is works. See http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/is/whs2011/thread/7df9d133-ce36-4c80-a43c-7e10ca9d85b1
Ha! You think it’s bad with WHS 2011? SBS 2011 Essentials works the same way!
Try explaining to a customer how and why they need to manually delete backups so they can have good backups, when the previous version of SBS maintained bacukps automatically?
And double insult – the new backup INSISTS on writing to an external drive, not a network share! Ugh…
Thanks to Geoff for pointing out the VHD information. I’m running SBS in a VM, and with my old version of SBS 2003 I was able to backup to a network drive. I have a Windows Home Server that I implimented mainly to backup the workstations, but it was easy to toss some extra disks in there and target it for backups from the SBS 2003 box. I then used CrashPlan Pro to, once a week, automatically sync the Friday backup to another server off site.
I was looking forward to crafting something similar with Server 2008 – with the advantage of the differential backups from Server 2008 vs. the full backups for every bacukp with Server 2003. Ha! I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy…
Some great links in the comments and more good stuff to ponder.
No wonder MS is ditching Volume Shadow Copies in Windows 8/Server 8 and going to versioning. I still hope it integrates with VSS and at a low level can just record the bits within files that change and not maintain whole new copies of files like Apple does with TimeMachine….
So if I don’t have any External drives available, and don’t trust the people in the office to rotate them out properly anyway, are there other methods that will work for backing up the important data from the server? Preferably via some sort of “Cloud” based backup option.
I can manually choose the shared folders and the location of the client backups. However I heard there’s also some database or something that you need in order to make the client backup files useful?
So if I install Mozy or Carbonite or something like that, and have to manually pick and choose which files/folders from the server get backed up, what all do I need to select so that if the building burns down, I can reinstall WHS 2011 on a new server, put the client backups wherever they need to go, and then restore all the files back out.
I’m installing WHS in a church office with very technically challenged people so I need to make this as automated as possible.
Mike, I’m not familiar with either Mozy or Carbonite, or other cloud solutions such as Cloudberry. So I’m not the best person to ask. You’ll probably have better luck asking over at the WeGotServed forums, e.g. in http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/forum/188-computer-and-server-backup/
The issue for me is that Cloud storage is an ongoing cost (and it ain’t cheap if you’ve got even a reasonable amount of data), whereas buying an external drive, or a removable drive is a one-time cost. That’s why I’ve never implemented it.
First off, thank you for sponsoring this blog.
I’m new to WHS. I’ve read in your blog and elsewhere of the problems with using the WHS backup feature.
I have a home network which consists of 3 Win 7 Computers. It was my intention to build a server based on WHS 2011 for home network file, print, media and backup duty. My question: Given the WHS 2011 backup issues is there anything which would prevent me from using a stand alone backup program, say Norton Ghost, on each of the network clients and backup each to a designated WHS hard drive? I intend to build the server using a hardware Raid 5 array adapter and five 1TB enterprise drives for storage with a separate 500GB drive for C:\ .
I apologize if I’m knocking on the wrong door
Sincerely,
Jim M.
Jim, I think it’s important to distinguish between the two types of backup that WHS 2011 offers: backup of client PCs, and backup of the server itself.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the server backup function that is brain-dead in WHS 2011. The client PC backup function is pretty damn good (with one limitation, which I’ll return to), and far more efficient (single instance storage for multiple PCs) and easier to use (in my opinion) than having to manage three separate instances of e.g. Norton Ghost backups.
The client PC backups do not have the 2TB limitation that the server backup has, providing you have sufficient pooled storage on your server to hold the client backups folder. The issue you are then faced with (which is also the case if you were to use Norton Ghost to create backups on the server) is how do you take a backup of the client backups… If the total amount of client PC backups exceed the server backup limit of 2TB, you’ll have to find an alternative for the built-in server backup function of WHS 2011.
Of course, you may consider that “a backup of the backups” is going too far; many people do. After all, the risk that you will lose both the client PCs data and their backups on the server simultaneously is low; it’s the risk of e.g. fire, flood or theft occurring with your systems. However, even though the risk is low, some people (myself included) like to hold offsite backups of critical data to cover that risk.
The current limitation of the client PC backup technology is that you cannot do a bare metal restore of a client PC that uses EFI and GPT discs. WHS 2011 will take backups, and you can restore files and folders, but you can’t do a bare metal restore (which is also much faster than restoring files and folders). It’s not a limitation for me, because none of my PCs currently use EFI/GPT, but new PCs are adopting that technology, which makes it an issue for the future, as far as I’m concerned.
Geoff,
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the short course. It was a good starting point for understanding the WHS backup scheme. And after several hours of homework on the web, I think I know enough now to get into trouble again.
My home network server and two of the three Win7 platforms are BIOS/MBR based. The third is EFI /GPT based. Are you familiar with FarStone’s “TotalRecovery 8 Pro” client backup/recovery software. Their blurb states it’s capable of Bare Metal backup and recovery and that the software is compatible with UEFI/EFI and GPT/Dynamic disks (http://www.farstone.com/software/totalrecovery-pro.php). If it does what it says, at $35, it will take care of my odd ball EFI/GPT system. However their server backup solution “Total Backup Recovery Server 8”, at $569, is priced at Enterprise support and way out of my league.
Exposing my ignorance again, is it possible to dual boot into Win7 on a WHS 2011 system?
Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Jim M.
Jim, sorry, I’m not familiar with the FarStone product, so can’t comment on how good it is. $35 seems a reasonable price to cover the EFI/GPT system. The only thing that you might want to check is whether in fact you can have both FarStone and the WHS connector/backup software coexisting on that particular client. I’m pretty sure that I’ve read cases in the WHS forums where Acronis backup software conflicted with WHS 2011 backups and caused some issues.
If there is a conflict, then it would be better not to install the WHS 2011 connector on that particular PC. You’ll still want to connect to the WHS for accessing Shared Folders though, so you’ll need to create a Windows Credential for this (on your client PC, go to Control Panel, User Accounts, Manage Windows Credentials and set one up there).
Re your question on whether it would be possible to dual boot into Win7 on a WHS 2011 system – I’m not sure. It probably could be set up that way. But I run my WHS 2011 as a headless system, so I wouldn’t be able to dual-boot, even if I wanted to. You might want to ask this question in one of the WeGotServed forums…
Geoff,
My thought was that if I could do a Win 7 boot into the server I might be able to then either bkup or clone the system and client drives as a work around. I know this would be clumsy but, if it’s possible, until this WHS 2011 issue is resolved in a more tidy fashion, it woulld be less so than loosing the system and starting fresh. Thank you again and I will take the question to one of the other forums.
Sincerely,
Jim M.
Hi Geoff, I’ve found this blog as I an a new convert from WHS V1 to V2 (this past weekend actually). I really liked the DE & pooling features so was wanting to have them in my new WHS2011 box. I tried Drive Bender and Drive Pool (separately) and both corrupted my system so bad I needed to reload shortly after configuring them to my needs\wants. Luckily, my data was on another drive so nothing was lost 🙂 I guess my only option now is to backup the backups and valuable data to another Drive so in case the worst case scenerio happens?? So far, WHS 2011 seems ‘ok’ however the failure of the DE replacements have left a bad taste and am rather nervous of my migration goals.
Thanks for your openness and non-bias opinions and support for us folks out here!
Hi Jim, sorry to hear about your bad experiences with DE replacements. I’ve come to accept the loss of DE in WHS 2011. I have neither RAID nor a third-party DE replacement on my system. I’m just following the KISS principle. While it has meant having to plan how I distribute my data across my drives (and subsequently manage it), at least I haven’t had any nasty surprises. And yes, I have had to put in a proper backup plan; but then again, RAID and DE never were a proper backup solution in my view anyway…
[…] some quirks and shortcomings, my Windows Home Server system has been quietly backing itself up onto a pair of hard drives that I […]
Hi Geoff,
Thanks for a really interesting blog!
I was wondering if you have had problems with client backups? I used WHS v1 earlier and this was never a problem. I can backup MS XP clients, but the Windows 7 client fails every time. The only thing that differ is that the C: drive is a SSD disc. Have you any experience of this?
BR Mike
BR Mike – it could be that the Windows 7 PC is using UEFI/GPT technology, rather than the older BIOS/MBR tech. The problem is that WHS 2011 cannot backup/restore client PCs that use system discs formatted using GPT rather than MBR.
Do you find that the backup fails at 1% of the backup being completed? That’s usually the symptom that signals that it’s a GPT issue…
Hi Geoff,
Thanks for a quick reply. Yeah, the backup stops after 1% 😦
How can I check if Win7 uses UEFI/GPT? If it does, can I change it?
BR Mike
UEFI is the modern 21st Century equivalent of the old BIOS of PCs, and GPT is the modern replacement of the older MBR – both methods of partitioning hard disks.
If you go into your UEFI setup before Windows boots, you should be able to see how your SSD has its partitions setup – either GPT or MBR. My guess is that it will be GPT. Some motherboards allow you to change this to MBR – but apparently not all…
The problem is that if you change this, you’ll also have to do a fresh install of Windows as far as I know. I’m not the best person to ask about this, because I’ve never had to do this. I suggest that you Google/Bing for step by step instructions. Good luck!
There’s some more background about this issue over WHS not supporting GPT discs here: http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/24174-computer-backup-with-uefi-gpt-guid-partition-vss-error/
Oki, thanks!
One of the great things with WHS v1 was the easy restorefunction. Do you know if there is another way to make easy (complete system) backups? In Win7 I have noticed that there is a function for backup management. Even the option for a system copy is available, but will that do the same job as the client backup function on WHS v1, or do I have to install Win7 all over again before I will be able to restore?
BR Mike
I’m really not sure. Windows 7 does have a system image backup/restore function, but what will happen if you take a system image of your SSD when it’s in GPT mode, and then try and restore it to the SSD when it’s in MBR mode, I really don’t know.
You might want to ask this question in an online forum…
Sorry that I can’t be of more help…
No problem, thanks for your replies. From what I can understand from your answer, I could use the win7 backup/restore function instead of whs 2011 for my client computer? If I save a backup to the whs server I should be able to restore the client again, if I still use the GPT mode, right?
BR Mike
Well, there’s a few caveats to be aware of.
First, it depends on which version of Windows 7 you have as to whether you will be able to make an image backup to a shared folder on your WHS 2011. If you have Windows 7 Home Premium, then the Windows 7 Backup application can only use an attached external USB drive. If you have the Pro or Ultimate version, then you can also use network drives – e.g. a shared folder on WHS 2011.
In addition, you should also be aware that the Windows 7 Backup application just takes a single snapshot of the state of your PC when you run it. It’s much more limited than the WHS 2011 Backup application, which provides snapshots over time, so that you can rollback your PC to how it was at a previous point in time, should that be required.
Hi Geoff (and others),
Great blog; some interesting tips in there. I wondered whether you’d have an answer for a small conundrum I’m facing with my WHS2011 at the moment.
When I decided to ‘upgrade’ my TranquilPC SQA5H Home server from v1 to 2011 I took the decision, which in retrospect I regret, to install DriveBender [I was nervous about losing the Drive Extender functionality – I should have been more nervous about losing WHS2011 functionality with DriveBender]. Having some time off work recently, I took the opportunity to remove all my data from the DriveBender pool and one folder at a time placed the data on the bare disks, as Microsoft intended. I think that I’ve achieved this now. During this process it was necessary to park one of the larger folders on the server’s D: drive (the remainder of the 1TB disk where the system C:drive sits). This done I was able, over 3 days, to remove empty disks from the pool and shuffle folders to the new non-pooled disks. Having completed this process I then moved the first large folder from the D:drive to the last freed up drive (H:).
My expectation was that this should return me to a state where the D:drive is ’empty’, However, on completion of this last step I find that the D:drive still has 63.3 GB of used space. Viewing this in Windows Explorer, the contents are $recycle.bin (empty), ‘Server Folders’ folder (empty) and ‘System Volume Information’ (whose properties show as 0 bytes). My ‘Folder Options’ are set to show hidden files.
Whilst I’ve been running WHS2011 since its official release, I now realise that some of the WHS2011 functionality without DriveBender is new to me. Before I moved the folder from the DriveBender pool to the D:drive it was definitely empty (I formatted it) and showed about 870GB free. After moving the same folder to the H:drive the D:drive has 808GB free. Is this normal? Am I safe to re-format D:drive? I’ve backed up the D: drive using the Server Backup (previously it was omitted), but this did not extend the size of the backup by 60GB. The size increased by what I think of as a ‘usual’ amount for an incremental backup. Any ideas what’s going on? All help gratefully received.
Dave D.
Dave, I think the D: drive has Shadow Copies enabled by default. They may account for the difference. But I’m just guessing… You may want to ask your question in one of the WeGotServed forums. You’ll have more eyeballs looking at it over there than here I think.
Excellent reading, kinda wish I’d not bother with WHS2011. All my data is now nearly over 2TB, which means I have no way to back up the server. What do people do if they have a server with say 5TB of data?
They either switch over to another backup solution, or use a combination. I do the latter – use the WHS Server Backup for my critical data (which fortunately comes in at under 2TB), and use Allway Sync to backup my non-critical data offsite.
Hi Geoff, glad to see the blog is still alive and well. After a massive hardware failure, 3 out of 5 drives in my WHSv2 box, lost a main data drive, client backup disk & the OS drive (aka power spike)meaning the server backups were also lost as they are keyed to the installation SID (I believe). I opted to advance up to Server 2012 Essentials. Have you checked out this route yet? Storage Spaces (also available in Win8) seems to be the next best thing since drive extender in WHSv1. I guess the biggest change it’s a lot much more beefy server back and front ended with a less colourful Dashboard. I believe 2012 Essentials also breaks the 2TB backup limit from WHSv2 as well as Server 2011 Essentials. So far, feels ‘too good to be true’, beyond the price tag, thank goodness for access to TechNet. I’d be willing to think anybody that has spent time with Server 2008r2 should be able to work within it without too much difficulty, average home users should be careful as Active Directory is not for the faint of heart.
Jim, I took a quick look at WS2012E when the beta came out. Although it has advantages such as being able to backup GPT clients, and server backup of more than 2TB, it has two disadvantages as far as I’m concerned. First is the Active Directory. I’m not sure that I want that (and its single point of failure) in my home. But second, and the real big disadvantage, is the high price. I simply can’t justify that to the financial controller in the house.
Oh, and Storage Spaces is interesting, but, unlike DE, it does not do automatic storage balancing, which strikes me as a limitation.
theres a hotfix that allows gpt/uefi disks now…
Sidney, thanks, yes – I know. I need to find time to update my blog entries that refer to the GPT issue.
I look forward to reading your update. I stumbled upon your blog when I was googling differences in client backups between whs 2011 and the new Server 2012 Essentials. Price isn’t an issue since I have technet, it’s just a matter of functionality and I was leaning towards 2012 but then I saw there is a domain requirement. I’m glad the hotfix is now available since I’m now leaning towards implementing 2011 just because of it’s simplicity.
Hi Sidney & Geoff. As above, I have been using WS2012E for a couple months now and find it’s a great alternative to WHSv2. The key points being it can backup >2TB data and use GPT natively for 3TB drives (etc) is a major plus for me. I also have a TechNet subscription so price is not a concern. Since I ‘prefer’ to have 1 backup source and my data + backups exceed 2TB, I felt the need to abandon WHS. I also really missed the drive extender so Storage Spaces seemed like a viable alternative. While it is true the server requires a domain, the attached PCs are not required (meaning they can remain in a workgroup). There is a Microsoft TechNet doc that guides you to the process, make sure you complete prior to connecting or you will migrate to the domain during the connector install. You can backout later on however I found my local ID did experience a couple difficulties however I was able to recover settings\preferences with a bit of time and effort. So in a nutshell, my server is a standalone domain controller and the 5 connected PCs are workgroup and work just fine. Of course, not joining the domain excludes group policy enforcement and other administration tasks client-server network admins control however this setup works quite well for for my personal home network. There is not a really large learning curve from server 2011 essentials to 2012, minor I would say from WHSv2 though. Adding a drive to an existing storage space is just as easy as WHSv1 so I am happy there. Note too that 2012 essentials can only connect win7 & 8 windows clients and I think MAC OSX 10.5 Leopard (or later). Since all my pcs were already 7 & 8 and I don’t have Mac at home, this is a non issue for me.
FYI — My server backups began failing after I installed a 2T Seagate AF drive. After much teeth gnashing, I discovered it was Advanced Format, which has physical sector sizes that are incompatible with the virtual drive system. (There is a blog posting that explains the incompatibility in detail.) I installed a Western Digital 2T drive with the smaller 512K physical sectors as the server backup disk. My server backups again work properly.
Interesting. All my drives have the 512K format, so I’ve not run into this issue (yet).
All my drives were Advanced Format Seagates. My HP RAID 5 also creates drives with the large sector size. AF seems to affect only the server backup drive (that I have changed to a 512K disk). See http://obscuretech.blogspot.com/2013/06/backing-up-windows-home-server-2011-to.html for details.
Has Microsoft actually fixed this problem with an update since or is it still exactly the same?
Which particular problem did you have in mind? There are lots associated with server backup. I don’t think any of them have been addressed, nor do I expect them to get fixed. The only backup issue that has been addressed is for client PC backups – GPT discs can now be handled.
Pardon I was actually referring to the original article problem where external drives are unreliable to make daily/weekly/monthly backups. Because of the server just giving an error or wiping the drive and starting backups from scratch
It’s good to hear about the GPT partitions now being able to backup.
Hi Geoff, thanks for keeping this tread alive for so long!
My server (2012essentials) backups are rather inconsistent. They claim to be incomplete whereas the listed drives individually are showing as successful. Strangely, the completion code is 0 (zero) which should be a success. I checked the windows event logs, apparently the backup includes taking a snapshot and converting into a VSS (virtual storage) and copies to the backup image. For some reason, the VSS drive snapshot is not getting deleted so the backup process ‘think’ this drive is not getting backed up, hense the ‘incomplete’ error pops up. I’ve researched this issue however have come up blank. Seems a reboot fixes this however unsure if this is a decent work around. I have followed numerous suggestions to move the shadow copies to a different volume, changed the max size however the incomplete warnings still comeback and only resolve if the backup runs then a reboot occurs before the next (server)backup runs, then will will be areported as a success. Client backups are not impacted. Strange, even the MS bugsite has nothing like this reported… In a home environment, no big deal however in a ‘real’ business environment, this is a big flaw for a server.
Jim, it might be worth raising this as a potential bug in the appropriate MS forum for WS2012E…
I found that this link worked great and all my WHS 2011 server backup history is gone!
http://www.petri.co.il/windows-server-backup-log-how-to-delete.htm
To clear server backup history log:
1. Open Event Viewer from the Administrative Tools folder.
2. Go to Applications and Services Logs.
3. Expand Microsoft > Windows > Backup.
4. Right click on the Operational Channel log and choose Save and Clear or just Clear in case you don’t want to save the existing log (he suggest you save the logs before clearing for any future reference).
@Trigger2142: Thankyou for the note, I’ll give this a try. I’ve also read that VSSADMIN has been updated in Server 2012 to DISKSHADOW. I created a task that runs weekly so I no longer have the ‘Incomplete’ server backup warning. Strangely, I noticed this error would occur when I needed to Remote desktop into the server.
hello Geoff, one very simple question. I have not found the answer to this on any of the forums. So many guys rotate backup drives. What is every one using to transport the removed drive to the offsite location? Just a simple anti-static bag, or is there a more sturdy long term method of carrying a loose drive? What do you do for yours? Thanks!
Just a simple anti-static bag for me. That’s sufficient for my needs, but others may have more rugged solutions…
While it’s no longer available, consider this an example. This is what I bought to transport my drive to my safe deposit box. It fit my external drive perfectly. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002CPZZLK/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Hi Geoff, thought you’d like to know about today’s “disaster recovery” from a total failure of my WHS11 server while I was away from home for 2 weeks – and yes it failed the day after we left. The failure was a Kingston 64GB SSDnow100 where the system disc was kept. After removing the disc it clearly has an interface problem and occassionally my PC could recognise it and install it but most times not. So I grabbed a really old laptop spinning drive and thought I’d quickly recover the system from my October backup. I keep my backup discs in freezer bags in another location (my workshop at the far end of my garden). Booted with a USB copy of the installation disc, answed all the question and then it failed with obscure error “The parameter is incorrect (0x80070057)”. Googling showed that this error can occur when creating a system image for a host of unecessary and stupid reasons and it took a little longer to find the error for restoring, but when I did I immediately thought of posting to your blog. You get this error if you DON’T pull the USB key you booted from out just before you answer the final question before commiting to the restore ….. wonderful, intuitive, nerds would figure it out for sure. Anyhow like a good sheep I laughingly gave it a go and the restore executed perfectly ….. Oh dear … time to cry about not knowing such an obvious fix to an intractable issue at a time of panic 🙂 Thought you’d like to know if you didn’t already ….
David (now waiting arrival of Samsung SSD850PRO from Amazon’s 24 hour delivery service).
Thanks for the tip, David. I could have done with it a couple of months ago, when I needed to replace my system drive. I got the same error, and finally gave up and installed afresh. Thankfully, I had all my data backed up, but had I known the trick, I could have saved a lot of time…
You sir, are a hero, and many thanks for posting this… Although I wish to heaven that I would have had this tip a few months ago….worked for 24 hrs straight twice with two different computers, gave up and did clean installs.
Ah ha …. now I’m nominated for knighthood, many thanks indeed ….. My replacement Samsung SSD850PRO just arrived and my AVAST PRO antivirus (usually well behaved) has decided the included Samsung CD clone software contains a virus ….. false friend – I think – so I’ve turned of the anti-V for 10 minutes 🙂 and the clone is underway now.
Dear Geoff,
I use a german version of WHS 2011, but I hope I will find the correct English words for everything. 😉 A question regarding my server backups: in spite of the fact, in the list of backups I see the first one on Janury 21st 2015, if I want to restore anything, the system tells me the oldest backup would be from Marxh 9th, 2015. I have changed nothing since the very first day I use the server (two years), and the settiings are: 1 backup per week and 1 backup per month will be stored.
Thank you in advance for your help
Tom
This happens if the name (or characteristics of your client has changed. Search for computer rather than accepting default.
Thank you David for the qucik Response, but my Problem is with the Server and not with a Client. I can not see any older version of server backup and I havent’t changed anything.
Tom, you say that your settings are “1 backup per week and 1 backup per month” – and these are for the Server backups? That’s very odd, because on my WHS 2011 system, there are no such possibilities as these for the Server backups, only for the Client PC backups.
On my system, I only get the possibility to customise the daily backup, and there is no way to specify the retention period. Another thing to realise is that the Server backup mechanism is completely different from the Client PC backup mechanism, and much more restrictive than the “time machine” capability of the Client PC backup..
When you view the Server Properties, you see the backup history, but that’s not the same thing as being able to restore from a server backup taken a few months back. The time window of being able to restore earlier versions of Server files is much more limited than what is shown in the backup history.
I think this thread is about the single most informative thing on the internet as far as WHS2011 backups go!!! THANK YOU Geoff!
Please forgive me if somehow I have not scanned this entire thread properly for the answer/info I am looking for. I am looking for information as to why my server backups can/do take so long. Server backups can go really really fast, and at other times very very slow.
Here is what I THINK I have observed:
* When a server backup has completed successfully, and I do not unplug the server backup drive, the subsequent backup completes very quickly – like in 5 minutes-ish.
* When either a server backup has not completed successfully OR due to the server backup drive being unplugged when the next scheduled server backup took place (resulting in an “error” because there is no backup drive), the subsequent backup completes very slowly = it is like the entire VHD system is re-scanned/compared.
I do not want to ALWAYS have a backup drive attached. I want to have a couple backup drives = one that I keep in my firesafe at home and update from time-to-time, and one that I keep in my safety deposit box at the bank – and rotate them from time-to-time.
Is what I am observing just expected behavior with WHS2011 server backup? When backing up after an “error” (either a previous unsuccessful backup OR a “missed backup” due to no backup server drive being available), is WHS2011 performing a “full check/scan” of my server backup since it encountered an error of some sort and the “error flag” has been tripped?
Mike, it’s quite possible that WHS 2011 performs a “full check/scan” of a server backup if an error condition has been encountered, but I don’t know for sure. I recall that I have seen the occasional very slow backup, and this may well have been following an error, so the two are related.
If this is triggered because you don’t always have a backup drive connected, then one way to overcome it would be to add a third drive into your backups, and rotate the three between the server and your two storage sites. WHS 2011 will keep track of multiple drives for server backups. That way you’ll always have a drive attached to the server, and have drives stored in your tow storage sites.
Hello everyone, and thanks for sharing your experience.
My question is this, when it’s safe to use an older backup drive? I’m at drive #6 (6 drives of 500 meg that I rotate every week), I would like to clear drive #1, that is full and use it again, but I’m afraid there is sensitive data (for the operating system) on it.
again, thanks for your time
Hi Charles-Andre… I don’t think that server backup works in quite the way that you seem to think it does. Each drive in a set of rotated drives carries complete backups of the server. If you look at the Backup tab in the Server Properties, you can see the list of the backups, the date that the particular backup was made, and the drive in the rotation set that it was created on.
Having six drives in a rotation set strikes me as being a bit of an overkill; two is the minimum necessary to have a drive present in the server at all times, while the spare is resting off-site.
Each drive starts off with a complete backup of the server, and on subsequent uses, an incremental backup is taken to reflect the changes since the date of the last backup. Once the drive is really full, then WHS 2011 should start over by reinitialising the drive for a new complete backup.
Thanks for the info Geoff,
it’s seem something is not working correctly, or I change something incorrectly on my server, when a drive, like my first one, is about to be full, I get an unsuccessful backup error with the mention : there is not enough space on the disk. The only way to resolve this issue is to change the backup disk
Hi Charles-Andre. I think the problem is that perhaps your drives simply aren’t big enough to handle the amount of data that you are trying to backup. The WHS 2011 help pages advise:
“Choose a drive that contains sufficient space to store your data. Your storage drives should contain at least 1.5 times the storage capacity of the data that you want to back up. The drives should also be large enough to accommodate the future growth of your server data.”
WHS 2011 needs that extra room to handle incremental backups, and to be able to prepare for reinitialisation of the drive when it really does get too full.
This make sense, since my source drive and my backup drive are the same size, but the data to backup from the source drive has grown since I installed the server, it was fine at the beginning, but now that the drive is 70% in used, it does not fit anymore on the backup drive
thanks again!
Great Blog, I been using WHS since around 2009 switched over to WHS 2011. Just know enough to get by. Server backup ran for years without issue until a couple months ago when I noticed the server backups were failing. Took me a while to figure out I had more client data/storage files then my 1 TB drive could hold. As luck would have it before I got a bigger drive my system drive started to go. I have a new 1 TB C: and D drive. I also have a 2 TB drive that I keep the client backup and another drive that I keep backup that I sync to the drive of pictures, videos, and music. I bought two 2 TB drives that I was planning on using to backup the baremetal and system drive files, along with some videos. On the other 2tb I was planning to backup the client backup data as well as my pictures and music. I having all kinds of issues until I started reading your blog. I erased the server database catalog and cleared the events backup log listing. Now I could start from scratch. The questions I am having are: Can you created two different backups one for the baremetal and the other for the clients? The other question is, when I am selecting the files for the client backup I am selecting the entire drive (F:) that hold the client backup and my pictures and music folders. I think its is about 1.2TB. The problem the wizard forces me to pick another drive(G:) and that I use to store a redundant backup of some pictures, music, documents. A window pops up telling I must select this drive for the backup to complete correctly. I have checked the folders on the dashboard and none of the folders point to this drive(G:). Any ideas why the wizard is forcing me to backup data that is on (F:). Thanks for any insights and help.
Mike, bear in mind that it’s been over a year since I stopped using WHS 2011, so my mind is now a bit fuzzy on the details. I think that the backup wizard only handles a single set of drives and data for backup – you can’t define two sets, one for the system data and one for the client backups. The only way to do this would be to take manual backups using the administrative tools directly on the server; i.e. bypassing the Dashboard completely.
I don’t know what’s going on with the F/G drive situation, I’m sorry. Perhaps you could try posting them as a question to the wider community of WHS 2011 users, over at the Microsoft WHS 2011 forum.
Thanks so much for the reply. I guess I was confused when I read several places that you could use multiple drives for the back up. I was thinking that since you named the drives it would know which backup configuration to use.
The other issue about the drive G: being selected my the wizard. I did find a client server folder on the drive that is empty. I tried to delete it in hopes that would solve the issue. The permissions on the drive would not let me delete it. I did not want to mess things up by manually changing things.
Just tried to remove folder…this time it worked.
Did I read the statement above correctly, that you could back up to a 4TB drive? Thanks for the help.
Mike, you can certainly do a backup to a 4TB drive, but the backup can never be more than 2TB, because of the VHD limitation…
Great reead thanks
A couple of months ago, I went to the book market at Bredevoort. I found a version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea published in an English translation with annotations by Walter James Miller. It is a large (almost A4-sized) book, profusely annotated in the margins of the text and containing many illustrations sourced from old engravings – some of which come from the original French edition of the book.
Intrigued, I bought it, and have now finished reading it. It’s been a revelation. I knew of the story, of course, along with others by Verne, but I have never actually read any of them. I had always thought that they were books written for children, but it turns out that my view was probably formed by osmosis from the reactions of the English-speaking literary establishment to the English translations.
Miller takes as his starting point the standard English translation produced in the 1870s by one “Mercier Lewis”. This turns out to be Lewis Page Mercier, a theologian. This “grim parson” (Miller’s description) thought nothing of excising 23 percent of Verne’s original text, often where he apparently disagrees with Verne’s views (e.g. on Darwinism). The remaining text is subject to hundreds of errors of translation, and he destroys many of Verne’s character sketches and jokes. What remained, and has formed the basis of the English translations ever since, is a travesty of the original novel.
Miller restored the missing 23 percent with his own translation, and provides annotations to show where Mercier, either unknowingly or deliberately got it wrong. Some of the translation howlers seem unbelievable, as where Mercier translates lentille (French for either the lentil or a lens) and has Verne write that Ned Land (the harpooner) could light a fire by holding a lentil up to the sun…
The restored and annotated translation thus becomes a completely new and powerful story for adults containing Verne’s scientific, social and political predictions. To quote from the dust-jacket:
In an imperialist age, Verne was concerned not only with the treatment of primitive peoples, but with the burgeoning power of what today we call the military-industrial complex; Nemo himself lives out the principles of philosophical anarchism. Verne also foresaw the smouldering of French separatism in Canada, the rebirth of China, and the rise of the American Goliath – all this in addition to his scientific prophecies, ranging from the use of electric “stun guns” to the ecological problems that would be caused by hunting the whale and other sea creatures to extinction.
What adds another layer of resonance to this tale is that the copy of the book I have is stamped with the imprint of the library of the merchant ship Royal Viking Star. So perhaps this book, before coming to rest in my library for the moment, has travelled twenty thousand leagues over the sea…
Aardman Animation’s latest, due in 2012. The Pirates! In an adventure with scientists. It doesn’t get better than this.
“Cracking hardtack, Gromit!”
🙂
The latest (and, I assume, the last) book of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire has finally been published. It’s A Dance With Dragons, bringing the saga that began with A Game of Thrones to an end (he said, hopefully).
As you will gather, I am not a fan of the series, having lost hope whilst slogging through book two (or was it three?). In that, I seem to be in a minority, but I took heart today from coming across a fellow critic: Hulk!
Some weeks back I mentioned that I should put Jon Ronson’s new book: The Psychopath Test on my list of books to read. I did, and I’ve now read it.
I liked it very much. Ronson’s style of writing is easy to read and often laugh-out-loud funny, although there are parts of the book that also made me gasp in astonishment. Don’t get it expecting to read an academic study on psychopathy (as some people who have reviewed the book on Amazon.com appear to have done, and who are then pissed-off to find it’s not). It’s not that at all. It’s more an exploration of some of the ways in which humans can behave, for better or worse. His jumping-off point is the strange story of a mysterious book: Being and Nothingness by an author Joe K (not Jean-Paul Sartre) copies of which were sent, out of the blue, to a number of neurologists and other academics. Ronson is invited by one of the recipients to get on the trail of who was behind the book, and along the way becomes intrigued by what defines mental illness.
From there he meets Tony, an inmate of Broadmoor (one of Britain’s three high security psychiatric hospitals) who claims that he faked a mental disorder in order to get a lighter sentence, but who is now stuck there, because nobody believes he is sane.
At the end of his book, Ronson returns to the story of both the mysterious book and Tony. Along the way, he meets many people involved in the “madness industry”; those who define the various labels of madness, those who wear the labels and those who use the label-wearers to make a living.
I found chapter 8 – The Madness of David Shayler – the saddest. Partly because it tells of the impact on Rachel North, who survived the Kings Cross bombing of 7/7, only to discover that conspiracy theorists claimed that there were no bombs and that she herself was a government mouthpiece who had been tasked with disseminating disinformation. And partly because it tells of the journey of David Shayler from being a former MI5 security officer to someone who believes that he is the Messiah. Ronson charts the degree of media interest in Shayler and concludes:
David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiralled into something too outlandish, too far out of the ball park and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation, we want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.
At the heart of the book is the Hare PCL-R Checklist, used to identify psychopathic traits. Ronson meets Bob Hare, the inventor of the checklist, on a number of occasions. The checklist becomes a leitmotif in the book, with Ronson musing on particular checklist items whilst describing the behaviour of those he meets, or even whilst describing his own behaviour and thoughts.
It’s a good book.
Just eight weeks after WHS 2011 became available to purchase, Microsoft have slashed the price. It’s now available to purchase for almost half of its original price. While I expected the price to fall, I didn’t think it would fall so far, so soon. I wonder whether Microsoft are trying to cut their losses on this?
As someone has just said on a forum, WHS 2011 looks as though it’s becoming the Microsoft Bob for this era…
So would you suggest not using it? I am considering using my old desktop machine as a home server, and was wondering if WHS would be well suited for the task (Drive Extender fiasco notwithstanding.) Lord knows I wouldn’t want to buy into another Microsoft Bob, or even another Clippy…
Tom, well, it’s really down to you to decide – I can’t make that decision for you 🙂 All I can say is that WHS v1 served me well, and saved my data (and my bacon) on a number of occasions. WHS 2011 is not the advance over v1 that I had expected it to be, but I can live with it. It will carry on the roles of taking backups of our computers and acting as the central storage of our digital media quite well. But it could have been better – I’ve listed its shortcomings often enough here in various blog posts – and that I find regrettable. I really don’t feel that Microsoft gave it their best shot.
BTW, if you’re going to use your old desktop machine as the basis for running WHS 2011, make sure that it’s 64bit-capable hardware. WHS 2011 requires this.
Meryl Streep is playing the role of Margaret Thatcher in a forthcoming biopic. The first trailer is now available. Streep has caught the voice to a “T”, as it were, and it sends shivers down my spine.
I’m torn between wanting to see the film, and dreading all the negative emotions that will be dredged up thinking about the impact Thatcher has had on British society.
I dislike many aspects of Thatcher’s personality myself, and in the elections of my country (the US) have voted for the Democratic candidate in every election for over thirty years. However, I saw firsthand how overly strong unions werd wrecking the UK economy as a teenager when my father was a Visiting Professor there in the late 1970s. Our car, made by the nationalized company British Leyland, managed to make the junk GM was then making look good. We had rolling power cuts due to strikes by coal miners and utility workers. The UK clearly needed to have a cattle prod applied to the backsides of its unions, and Thatcher was exactly that. Now I think the pendulum has swung the other way on both sides of the Atlantic and corporations are too powerful. But let us not forget why Thatcher became PM!
Thanks Matt. I agree that things in the UK were hardly perfect at the time, but I still have a nagging doubt that the cure was worse than the disease! 🙂
Yes, I know I’ve complained about the poor quality of the support documentation for Windows Home Server before (here, here, and here), but I just keep finding more examples.
The latest is the Solution Center page for Windows Home Server 2011 in the Microsoft Support web site.
It says at the top: “Windows Home Server 2011” and “The solution center applies to current versions of Windows Home Server” (i.e. Windows Home Server 2011). According to the page, it was last reviewed by Microsoft, presumably for correctness, on June 22nd, 2011.
Yet, if you click the link for the Windows Home Server product guide, what you will get is the Product Guide that was issued for version 1 of Windows Home Server in January 2009. So, not for Windows Home Server 2011, then.
And under the Learning More section, the penultimate link should really read “Monitor the health…” not “Monitors the health…” Yes, it’s a little thing, but it seems to me to be indicative of a continuing lack of attention to quality of product.
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