FAQ for Windows Home and SBS Backup

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** Frequently Asked Questions for Windows Home and Small Business Server Backup**

Background

Server backup is a main feature of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essential, Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. It will back up the customer selected items to a destination volume regularly. These backups can be used to restore the files if they are deleted by mistake or by malware.

This topic provides information about some frequently asked questions from community users.

FAQ List

How to back up the data in volume which is larger than 2TB?

Currently, server backup only supports a volume smaller than 2TB as the source, if your volume is larger than 2TB, there will be an error dialog shown if you select it during configuring server backup. Here is the way to remove such a restriction in the backup wizard.

  1. Log into the Colorado host server. 
  2. Close the dashboard session if it is opened.
  3. Use regedit to add following registry value
  • Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Server\Server Backup
  • New a QWORD Value, the name is “MaxVolumeSize” and its value should be some number larger than your volume size. E.G. 2TB is 0x1FDFFE00000 (2190431223808 bytes).
  1. Open the dashboard.
  2. Customize the server backup or setup the server backup. You can choose your volume as the source now. If you still hit the error dialog, please
    1. Check the registry name. It should have no blank space.
    2. The value you input for the registry should be larger than the actual volume size in bytes.

Please notice that even though you can now back up the volume when the volume size is larger than 2TB, only 2TB data can be backed up on this volume.

Can backup spanned to several volumes? The answer is No. We don’t support spanning. Backup will report a failure if the first disk is full when multiple disks are selected as the backup destination. You will see an alert, as well as an error in the backup details,  that there is unsuccessful backup, with error “There is not enough space on the disk”. IF you want to use other disks, you can manually switch to other disks on the list after the first one is full. When muliple disks are selected for Server Backup, Backup will select the first drive in the list. When the first destination volume is full, you can unmount or unplug it;  In that case, Backups will “roll-over” to the next drive. The next backup will start using the next drive.

What’s the server backup size limit?

Server Backup uses the .VHD file format to store the backup data.  It has a 2TB limit for its maximum size. So, please make sure the total size of your backup source data is less than 2TB.

What’s the supported hard disk formats for Server Backup? Our servers use Windows Server 2008 R2 as its base OS, for more details of the support for hard disk format on OS version; please refer to the KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018. Currently, only the hard disks that have logical sector sizes of 512 bytes are supported. So, for Advanced Format disks which have a 4 KB physical sector size, these are only supported when they emulate a logical addressing interface of 512 bytes.