Category: Troubleshooting

Found packs in index but not appearing on disk. Reindex needed

Found # packs in index but not appearing on disk. Reindex needed! Please contact your support agent for more information. The retention encountered a problem (exit status 1)

To correct this warning, please complete a re-index and a retention pass of your storage vault:

-Open the eazyBackup desktop application
-Select the 'Settings' tab.
-Right click on the eazyBackup storage vault
-Select Advanced -> Rebuild Indexes

The index process can take anywhere from several minutes to hours depending on the size of the vault and the number of snapshots. When the index process is complete, run a retention pass on the storage vault.

-Open the eazyBackup desktop application
-Select the 'Settings' tab.
-Right click on the eazyBackup storage vault
-Select Advanced -> Apply retention rules now

When the task finishes, re-run your backup and confirm the warning message has been resolved. Please contact our support team if you need additional assistance.

eazyBackup

Windows Backup encountered an error when writing data to the backup target.

During a Windows System Backup this error may appear in your job log.

The backup error is indicating that the Spool volume was not accessible, or there was an error writing to that device. This could mean the drive was detached or went offline, the spool device may be a failing. If this is a an external device check your USB cable.

If you are certain your spool volume is attached and working normally, run your back up again and see if the issues re-occurs. please contact support for additional assistance

eazyBackup

Error “The target path ‘X:\WindowsImageBackup’ already exists – please safely remove this directory and retry the backup.”

The "Windows System Backup" Protected Item type uses the wbadmin program to write a disk image to the spool directory; backs up the spool directory with eazyBackup; and then cleans up the spool directory. eazyBackup automatically removes this directory after the backup, even if the backup failed.

If the directory exists at the start of a backup job, this could mean either

  1. eazyBackup did not have the chance to clean up the directory (e.g. the PC was not shut down safely); or
  2. another eazyBackup backup job is running simultaneously; or
  3. another non-eazyBackup software on the PC is also using the wbadmin functionality for System State or Windows System Backup.

You can avoid case 2 above by using the "Skip if already running" option.

It's not generally possible to distinguish between case 1 and case 3 above. If you look at the job history and you are able to make a positive distinction between these cases, it may be safe to delete the directory.

You can temporarily add the following command as a "Before" command to the backup job:

rmdir /S /Q "X:\WindowsImageBackup\"

You should then remove this command from the job settings after the command has run, because this command would cause problems if two eazyBackup backup jobs ever run simultaneously in the future.

 

eazyBackup

Error “EFS-encrypted files may be unusable once restored”

You may see a warning of this form in the backup job logs:

EFS-encrypted files may be unusable once restored, unless you also backup the EFS encryption keys from this PC.
To disable this warning, please ensure you have backed up the EFS encryption keys, and then enable the 'I confirm EFS keys are exported' option in the Protected Item settings.

EFS is a Windows feature that allows you to encrypt individual files on disk. The backup job was successful, but if you restore the data to a new PC, the files might not be readable because the EFS encryption keys are tied to the Windows user account. In effect, the backup might not be restorable in a practical sense.

For more information, please see the full article on EFS in the documentation section,

eazyBackup

Error “Media is write protected” backing up OneDrive with VSS

To save on disk space, OneDrive (and some other cloud storage providers) use a system where some files are only "virtually" stored on the local disk, and are materialized from the cloud storage on-demand.

When you use the "Take filesystem snapshot" option in eazyBackup, eazyBackup takes a VSS snapshot of the disk. This is a read-only snapshot.

When you back up the OneDrive directory with VSS enabled, OneDrive is not able to download files into the snapshot, because the snapshot is read-only. This causes the "Media is write protected" error message.

In this situation, your OneDrive data is not being protected by eazyBackup and is not available for restore.

You can workaround this issue by creating two Protected Items: one with VSS enabled, that excludes the OneDrive directory; and a second one with VSS disabled, that only includes the OneDrive directory.

Note that if OneDrive needs to materialize a lot of data from the cloud, then backing up the OneDrive directory may cause a lot of data to be downloaded.

A future version of eazyBackup may avoid this issue by automatically disabling VSS for the OneDrive directory.

 

eazyBackup

Change of hardware causes registration dialog to appear

eazyBackup detects the current device based on a hardware ID.

The hardware ID may be changed in some situations:

  • if you replace the motherboard or CPU; or
  • if you upgrade the BIOS / UEFI, without preserving hardware IDs; or
  • if you virtualise a physical server; or
  • if you migrate a VM guest to a different VM host, without preserving hardware IDs; or
  • if you install "sandboxing" software, or install certain PC security software that includes a "sandboxing" feature (e.g. Comodo Containment); or
  • if you make certain specific modifications to the operating system.

In these situations, the device's hardware ID will change, and eazyBackup will recognize the PC as a new device.

Handling a changed device ID

If your device is recognized as a new device, you should register it again.

The original backup data is still preserved in the Storage Vault, and will be deduplicated against any future backups from this device.

Contact eazyBackup Support

eazyBackup support staff can move the Protected Item settings from one device to another. Please contact support to request this.

The old device must be revoked once the new device has been properly set up to prevent it from incurring additional charges, Please contact support to request this.

Alternatively, removing all Protected Item's from the old device will also prevent the device from being charged.

The backup job log history will be preserved, but, they will be associated with the old device.

  • Once you de-register the original device, it would show as "Unknown device (XXXXX...)" in the job history.
  • Customers can still see these old jobs in eazyBackup if they use the filter option > "All devices".

 

 

eazyBackup

Out of memory

eazyBackup needs RAM to run. The main cause for this is to hold deduplication indexes; therefore the amount of RAM used is proportional to the size of the Storage Vault.

You might see these error messages:

  • runtime: VirtualAlloc of 1048576 bytes failed with errno=1455 on Windows
  • 0x5AF ERROR_COMMITMENT_LIMIT: The paging file is too small for this operation to complete. on Windows
  • fatal error: out of memory on all platforms

On Linux, when the system is out of memory (OOM), the kernel "OOM Killer" subsystem will immediately terminate a process of its choosing, to free up memory. If you see an error message like signal: killed in eazyBackup on Linux, this means the process was terminated by a user or a subsystem, that might possibly be the OOM Killer. You can check for this in dmesg or kern.log.

You can reduce eazyBackup's RAM usage by trying to limit how much data is in each Storage Vault. For instance, instead of having multiple devices backing up into a single Storage Vault, create multiple Storage Vaults for each device. This will reduce the deduplication efficiency, but it will also reduce the necessary memory usage.

Trade-offs 

Some trade-offs are possible, that can reduce eazyBackup's memory usage at the expense of other system resource types:

Rescan unchanged files 

This option causes eazyBackup to read more data from the source disk, reading less data from the Storage Vault into in-memory indexes. This can have a varied impact on RAM usage, and may be positive or negative depending on the shape of your directories.

Prefer temporary files instead of RAM 

The "Prefer temporary files instead of RAM" option on a backup job schedule will cause eazyBackup to keep indexes in an on-disk database file, instead of a pure in-memory index. The on-disk database file is mapped into pageable memory, that can more easily be reclaimed by the OS when the system is under memory pressure.

Depending on how you measure eazyBackup's memory usage, this option may not immediately appear to have lower memory usage if your measurement includes mmap disk sections. However, the resident working set is reduced.

There is a major performance penalty for using this option (approximately 5x or worse) and it is not generally recommended.

 

eazyBackup

Inactive / Abandoned “Running” Jobs

Error: This job was thought to have stopped, but it seems to still be running.

eazyBackup on the customer PC is responsible for closing-off a job log, there are certain situations where a job would be left in "Running" state indefinitely, for e.g If the PC is shut down unexpectedly.

To clear old, inactive "Running" jobs you can try the following solution or contact support for assistance:

  • Solution:
    • The vault in use must be unlocked before new jobs can proceed. Run a retention pass on the storage vault to cancel abandoned / inactive jobs and unlock the vault - From the Settings Panel, right click on the Storage vault in use -> Advanced -> Apply retention rules now
      backup retention pass
    • Once the retention pass has been completed, try running a new backup job on the same device.
  • If the backup still fails after running the retention pass, please contact support and request the abandoned job to cancelled. 

eazyBackup

Network connectivity errors

When eazyBackup uploads files to your eazyBackup Storage Vault (or to a cloud storage provider) over the internet. Occasionally, you may see errors such as the following:

  • Malformed response from the server: Post "https:/www.... dial tcp: lookup: no such host
  • Couldn't save data chunk:
  • HTTP/1.x transport connection broken
  • net/http: request canceled (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)
  • wsarecv
  • wsasend
  • An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
  • dial tcp: lookup [...]: no such host
  • connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

eazyBackup retries the upload several times, but eventually gives up. After a failed data chunk upload, you may see several more messages of the form Couldn't save data chunk: context canceled while eazyBackup terminates the other upload threads.

Network errors have many possible causes:

  • Customer's PC
  • Customer's network
  • Customer's ISP
  • Internet outages between customer's ISP and eazyBackup
  • Customer router is not capable of handling a large number of open connections for parallel transfers

To troubleshoot these issues, please check:

  • Does the backup succeed if it is retried?
    • Many network errors are temporary and will only occur rarely. In addition, a repeated second backup job will often run faster because many of the existing data chunks have already been uploaded. (Any unused data chunks in the Storage Vault will be automatically cleaned up by the next retention pass.)
  • Does the error message always happen at a certain time of day?
    • It may be possible to reschedule the backup to avoid times of heavy internet congestion.
  • Check for packet loss using the instructions below, and test the latency between your device and our servers.
  • Routers can be overloaded, does the backup succeed if the router is rebooted?

Network errors often appear when the customers network is not capable of handling a large number of open conenctions between your device and our service. If your network is unable to handle this, you often will see network related errors in your backup logs.

  • To check for packet loss:
    From windows command prompt can you run:

    ping -n 100 csw.eazybackup.ca
ping -n 100 csw.onlinebackupcanada.ca
  • Check TCP segments retransmitted before and after a backup
    - From windows command prompt run:

    netstat –s –p tcp

    - Make a note of the current values (before backup) of Segments Sent and Segments Retransmitted
    - Run a manual backup, wait for it to finish
    - run:

    netstat –s –p tcp

    - Check the number of segments sent and retransmitted, this way you can see the percentage of packet loss during the backup.

 

eazyBackup

Error “Access is denied” when backing up files and folders on Windows

An "Access Denied" error message means that the Windows user account running the backup job does not have access to read the file content.

Current versions of eazyBackup automatically create a service account with all necessary permissions to read local files. If you are experiencing "Access Denied" errors you may be trying to back up a network path that has been mounted as a directory. Please see the "Accessing Windows network shares and UNC paths" article for more information.

If you are experiencing "Access Denied" errors and you are certain that you are not backing up a mounted network path, you may need to change the eazyBackup Delegate service log-on user.

Press Windows Key + R to open the Run box.

Type services.msc, press OK.

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In the list of services, locate the eazyBackup Delegate service. Double click to open.

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From the Log On tab you will need to change the 'This account' user from eazybackup.delegate to an admin user that has read permission to your selected files.

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Enter the password for your admin account, press OK to confirm the changes.

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Restart the service for your changes to take effect.

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eazyBackup

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