Checking the integrity of windows 2008 server backup

Hi all

There is a simple way to check the integrity of a backup made with Windows Backup in Windows 2008 Server Enterprise (not R2)? Today i tried to restore some files from a backup I made some days ago, and the Windows Backup snap-in reported that the file was unreadable. I think the corruption occurred due to the network share in wich the files were being stored went offline during the backup process, that was my fault.

Regards

Norberto

From serverfault Norberto

• wbadmin get versions -backuptarget:\\server\share

  if you need more details:

  wbadmin get items -version:mm/dd/yyyy-hh:mm -backuptarget:\\server\share

  Norberto : Unfortunatelly I overwrote the corrupted backup and I won't be able to make a test. I will accept this as an answer. Thanks Chris.

  Norberto : So, my backup became corrupted again. This time I really don't know why. The problem is that these commands don't report any error. None of the two. I'll keep looking.

  Chris S : @Norberto, What kind of server are you backing up to (the one hosting the file share)? Is it a NAS, Samba Server, or older Windows box?

  Norberto : It's a Windows XP SP3.

  Chris S : You've got me; I don't see anything inherently wrong with what you're doing. It's a support configuration. Perhaps the disk has issues? Have you tried running chkdsk on the XP box, or checking the event log for SMART messages?

  Norberto : I have some entries like this on the server (translated from portuguese): lsass (676): Failure while writing on file "\\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy30\Active Directory\NTDS\ntds.dit" on displacement 5603328 (0x0000000000558000) to 8192 (0x00002000) bytes after 0 seconds with system error 21 (0x00000015): "Device not ready. ". The write operation will fail with error-1022 (0xfffffc02). If this error persists then the file may be damaged and may need to be restored from a previous backup. After I deleted the corrupt backup, the backup ended without any error.

  Norberto : I think it's because I'm backing up to a Samsung S2 USB external drive, it's not the appropriate device for this task. However, the point is that I want to automate the process of validating the backup, to see if the backups are usable.

  Chris S : @Norberto, Those errors are definitely the backup failing; I'm not sure why it would have any problems with that though. Perhaps try plugging the USB drive into the server directly and see if that fixes it. This is sounding more and more like a weird quirk somewhere, not a big per-se.

  Norberto : @Chris: I already have tried to plug it directly to the server, but Windows Server Backup has some problems with the sector size of the drive, so I made this workaround (see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsbackup/thread/5d9e2f23-ee70-4d41-8bfc-c9c4068ee4e2)

  Chris S : @Norberto, well I'm surprised that Windows Backup can't adapt to different sector sizes, but apparently that's the problem.
  From Chris S