hi,

I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 and use the incremental backup feature. The backup has run for 512 days, so I have 512 versions stored on my NAS. The volume, where backup is stored is an iSCSI mounted LUN in a QNAP NAS.

A few days i recognized, that the volume is about to be full and has just a few GB free space left. btw, the volume is 2TB in total.

My plan was to reset the entire backup volume and start with a new one (I also want to change the backup config, cause there are some directories I don't need to backup...)

But I don't want to lose all my backup versions as well, so I used the 'Raw Copy' backup functionality of my NAS and made a raw copy of the LUN. afterwards I moved the entire raw copy on a new harddrive (just with dd on linux machine).

so far so good, the volume is detected and I can browse the directories of the backup drive and at first glance it seems that everything worked as expected.

BUT... I am not able to restore any backups (except the last day), cause the windows backup tool can't find any previous versions. On the original LUN, that is still mounted (I havent reset the LUN yet) all versions are available.

I have to confess that I'm kind of confused now :), since both drives should be identical, but with one I can do things a can't do with the other one.

The only difference is the drive letter (btw. I hope drive letter is the correct translation for the drives name like c:, d:; cause I'm using german windows version) and I don't know if this may be the problem... (I can't imagine that it's that simple, I think it has something to do with the volume shadow copies, cause a few months ago I tried the same thing, by simply moving the directories from the original drive to a new one and I failed. I then used another NAS to restore my raw image there, mounted the drive via iSCSI on my server and it worked great. so I thought, since both actions do approximately the same thing, I could do it without the NAS, since it's not available at the moment)

*edit:

one additional thing I forgot:

the first time, I connected the copied drive to my server, the drive was offline in the disk management; so I switchted to online and then it got mounted....

I hope that somebody can help me :)

best regards

Thomas

• Edited by tk___001 13 hours 4 minutes ago

Hi,

I think duplicate the backup target disk to another will not work. But it is still worth to have a try to change the drive letter as logically it is the only difference between these 2 disks.

Or how about just add the second disk to your schedule?

You can modify the schedule and add a second hard disk as a backup target. Then you can disable or offline the original disk so that all new backups will be stored to the new hard disk and in the meantime the old disk is still there when you need old backups. If you need to remove some find from backup, you can also modify "file are going to backup" or add them into the exclusive list.