Vista Home Premium (64 bit) backup problems

[nemolomen]

Has anyone else encountered an issue while trying to use the Vista backup and Restore Center to create a file backup on an Amahi share?

What I get is a message stating "Cannot create a file when that file already exists. (0x800700B7)". In looking into this issue I found the "I’m trying to back up to a NAS device, but it’s not working. How can I fix this?" section of http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/ ... a-faq.aspx which says it is a Samba issue and installing Samba v3 may fix it. My HDA already had Samba v3.2.5 and I just upgraded it to v3.2.7, but it is still not working.

The share I'm trying to back up to is on a USB MyBook with a FAT32 format. Could this be causing the problem?

Any thoughts would be gratefully appreciated.

[moredruid]

just to get the info straight:
you're trying to backup an external USB (FAT32) drive (on Vista) to the Amahi server?

Have you tried backing up something from the local Vista disk? If this works, you know for sure it's in the USB part

[nemolomen]

you're trying to backup an external USB (FAT32) drive (on Vista) to the Amahi server?

Sorry for not being clear. The USB (FAT32) drive is attached to the HDA. It contains a "Backups" folder which is shared as Backups and is where I store backups from all of the machines on the network.

I found some more information that indicates I may have a file permissions issue because I can't set (Unix/Linux) permissions properly on the FAT32 drive (unsupported). But this is only an issue with Vista since I currently have 3 XP and 1 Ubuntu machines that save backups to that location without problems.

I'll post here if I figure it out.

[moredruid]

This thread here suggests fiddling around with your umask in the mount options (and /etc/fstab). You might wanna check that out.

[relrobber]

umm...FAT32? why?

[chupacabra]

Same on 32 bit on a machine that had Fedora9/amahi that was working.

[moredruid]

hmm some questions:
- how is the disk mounted (case sensitive/insensitive, ro/rw)?
- how big is the backup you're trying to create (FAT32 has a 4GB filesize limit)?
- can you access it from other clients?
- if you can't properly set unix permissions you can take a look at the umask settings during the mount.
look here for some more info.

FAT32 has a lot of issues since it's a filesystem from way back ('96 IIRC) AND it's written by Microsoft

[t800]

umm...FAT32? why?

I don't think the manufactures are completely daft formatting them Fat32. A there are a few variants of Fat32 to support larger fat tables and drive LBAs. They market these things as an easy to use plug 'n' prey convenience device to recycle their low spec hard drives to copy zillions of pictures and music files that rarely hit the > 4gb barrier.

I think its simply due to the adhoc way in which NTFS works with multiple instances of copy operations. This causes dopey Windows exploder to hang on to the file handles to append the NTFS meta blocks. Hence the reason why defraging NTFS causes more fraging as it deposits a new meta blocks slap in the middle of you free drive space. Thus you can never "safely disconnect" the device with out a "File open or in use" error and your forced shutdown with it connected or risk a validation error when you give up and rip the USB cable out. As any linux Fuse user will testify, badly removed USB NTFS devices can be a pain NFTS is good for hard drives but can cause data loss on removables.