I wanted to make a new backup system that didn’t chew up all the Internet bandwidth. I decided to make a stat-alone NIS for backups. If the house burns down then my laptops, and the NIS will go, but my plan is to shadow the NIS up to Glacier for safety.
Of course that was great in theory but then I discovered that W7 has it’s own challenges.
In theory Windows has all this covered with the Backup facility in the control panel. I have used it before with no issue.
However whenever I tried to backup I got some sort of credentials failure.
After literally days of scouring the web I finally uncovered the two gotchas that were causing the problem. It’s hard to believe that so few people have encountered this problem.
The two issues
- The windows backup service was not setup correctly, even though it was a fresh install on a new machine. W7 Pro had left the backup service uninitialized. In the following image it shows that it is in “Manual” mode, but by default it is initialized – i.e. the “Startup Type” field was blank. As soon as I set it to “Manual” the credentials issues went away, and my password was acceptable.
- Now the backup would start, but it failed after about 20 seconds with this message:
This makes it sound like there is insufficient room on the NAS to hold the backup, but that is clearly not the case. It was caused by their being insufficient disk space on the local recovery partition. The backup process uses local disk space to buffer results before sending them to the NAS. I extended the partition to about 5GB and the problem went away.
Backups are now being sent to the NAS correctly. Two at the same time even!
