After my last WHS meltdown, I finally rebuilt my WHSv1 and it's backing up all my systems successfully. I also restored my old shares and the data they contained. I decided to re-purpose my 2T drives as "external" backup drives (I use a SATA hot-swap bay to connect them) to use WHS's data backup features but now discovered that this backup routine can't handle long file paths > 240 characters or so.
One problem with this is Mac files: program packages are seen as folders in Windows which leads to extremely long file paths. I was successful in transferring these files to WHS and when copying failed using the WHS backup feature some research revealed that while WHSv1 had a bug fix to deal with long paths using DE, this fix never made it to the secondary data backup code, and likely never will.
When I was copying these Mac files and some audio media files with very long descriptive names over to WHS in the first place, copy, xcopy and Richcopy all had issues with the path lengths. However, Robocopy, which is now included in W7, turns out to be a long path champ and got all my data onto the WHS shares without issues.
So assuming Robocopy will work in WHSv1 (it's part of the Server 2003 resource kit) , the questions are:
1. Is the file length restriction a function of the operating system or the software being used? ie: will Robocopy's long file path capabilities work within WHS?
2. Should I mount and format the external drive to be used for this backup via the WHS Console or independently via RDC and the system's Disk Management and just leave the drive as a "Non Storage Hard Drive" as far as the console is concerned?
3. Would this be a good workaround? Or is there something I need to watch out for?
It should be relatively easy to set up the appropriate batch file and execute it on when required. Thanks.
One problem with this is Mac files: program packages are seen as folders in Windows which leads to extremely long file paths. I was successful in transferring these files to WHS and when copying failed using the WHS backup feature some research revealed that while WHSv1 had a bug fix to deal with long paths using DE, this fix never made it to the secondary data backup code, and likely never will.
When I was copying these Mac files and some audio media files with very long descriptive names over to WHS in the first place, copy, xcopy and Richcopy all had issues with the path lengths. However, Robocopy, which is now included in W7, turns out to be a long path champ and got all my data onto the WHS shares without issues.
So assuming Robocopy will work in WHSv1 (it's part of the Server 2003 resource kit) , the questions are:
1. Is the file length restriction a function of the operating system or the software being used? ie: will Robocopy's long file path capabilities work within WHS?
2. Should I mount and format the external drive to be used for this backup via the WHS Console or independently via RDC and the system's Disk Management and just leave the drive as a "Non Storage Hard Drive" as far as the console is concerned?
3. Would this be a good workaround? Or is there something I need to watch out for?
It should be relatively easy to set up the appropriate batch file and execute it on when required. Thanks.