When Windows Vista and Server 2008 were released, Microsoft turned its back on tape backup. The built-in backup utility only backs up to hard drives. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 continue this policy. The recommended strategy for Small Business Server 2008 and 2011, for example, is to have a bunch of external USB drives and to use them in rotation.<\/p>\n
Windows Server Backup, and its command-line version wbadmin, work well enough, but users with growing storage requirements have been buying larger external drives. That seems fine: external USB drives with 2TB and 3TB capacities are now commonplace. Except that they often run into problems when used with Windows Server Backup. You might see error 2155348010 or 0x8078002A, or “The request could not be performed because of an I\/O device error”, or some other error.<\/p>\n
The reason is that most of these large drives have a 4K sector size, rather than the older 512 byte sector size. You can get a patch <\/a>for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that fixes most problems, but it does not fix the backup issue.<\/p>\n The further reason is that Windows Server Backup uses VHD virtual drives as its file format. The VHD format presumes the use of 512byte sectors, and the drivers that read and write data are optimised for this. You cannot create or mount VHDs on a disk with 4K sectors.<\/p>\n Microsoft has more information here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some drives have a firmware option to emulate 512byte sectors. These drives work, but with a performance penalty. Western Digital is one such, and you have a WD drive you may be in luck. See this post<\/a> for details.<\/p>\n What is disappointing here is that these drives are mostly sold without any warning about these compatibility issues. The drive vendors will say that Microsoft should update its backup software; this is correct, but since the problem seems to be inherent to the VHD format it is not trivial to do so.<\/p>\n Another problem is that discovering whether or not the drive you are about to buy has a 4K sector size is not easy. Once purchased, you can find out by attaching the drive. opening an administrative command prompt,\u00a0and running:<\/p>\n fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x:<\/p>\n where x is the drive letter of the target drive. This will show the sector size, and may even include the words “Not supported” in the output.<\/p>\n Windows Server 8 introduces the .VHDX format which both supports larger drives, and also fixes the issues with 4K sector sizes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Windows Vista and Server 2008 were released, Microsoft turned its back on tape backup. The built-in backup utility only backs up to hard drives. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 continue this policy. The recommended strategy for Small Business Server 2008 and 2011, for example, is to have a bunch of external USB drives … Continue reading Why your new 2TB or 3TB drive will not work with Windows Backup<\/span>