Backup to USB drive fails after about 4Gb

[jezzer]

   

I have a LinkStation Pro 320GL (320Gb) NAS drive which I've just connected up to a Buffalo JustStore 1Tb USB drive which I want to use to backup the NAS.

 

Having had a few problems due to formatting the drive NTFS, I've now used the NAS utility to reformat the drive as FAT32. I used FAT32 because if the NAS fails I want to be able to quickly access the content on the USB drive from a Windows XP machine (I have XP Pro and Home here)

 

I am now able to get the backup utility in the NAS to start OK, but it fails after a short period of time. I don't know if this is a co-incidence, but it seems to fail after about 4Gb of transfer. I first did a Normal backup, which transferred about 4.4Gb and after that failed, I kicked off a Differential backup which took the volume of data transferred to 8.7Gb before it failed.

 

I have the 'Create Backup Logfile' checkbox selected in the backup setup but no logfile is being created.

 

Any suggestions on either how to get the backup to complete (why is it failing and what is the solution?) or if you recommend that the solution may be to reformat as XFS, can you recommend a decent XFS reader for Windows XP?

 

[Thaitawat]

   

The Buffalo NAS is only able to read NTFS. If users need to write to the USB drive(s), they will have to be formatted by the Buffalo NAS.

 

[jezzer]

   

Thanks for your input. I had originally formatted the USB drive as NTFS but the NAS drive saw it was read-only. I don't think the NAS drive can write to NTFS.

 

The NAS drive is writing to the USB drive OK, but - I have an update (was looking in the wrong place for the logfile, as the location has moved since I installed the USB drive in place of the old failed backup drive)

 

Here is the error: -

 

rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync: write failed on "/mnt/usbdisk1/_backups/share/Files/Ali laptop backup/Memeo/Ali's Backup/C_/Documents and Settings/Ali/My Documents/TempImage.nrg": File too large (27)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(252) [receiver=2.6.8]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (9170 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(463) [sender=2.6.8]

 

Tempimage.nrg is a 4.5Gb file, which from what I've read is too big for FAT32. Is that correct? In that case it's probably not safe to continue with FAT32 (even though I can delete Tempimage.nrg). Who knows when I might have another file > 4Gb?

 

So problem likely identified, anyone recommend a decent XFS reader for Windows XP? I can't find anything on download.com.

 

Thanks in anticipation.

 

Jez

[PCPiranha]

It would probably be a good idea to format to XFS as fat32 has a file transfer limitation of 4 GB.  I will see if anyone around here know.  I am not sure of a good program, when i did a search for it I found a couple of ideas but nothing that I have personally used.

[PCPiranha]

Jezzer you are correct, USB drives formatted to NTFS will be read only

[dmchenry]

   

So correct me if I am wrong.  You are saying that NTFS can not be utilized from a windows permission aspect then.  In other words I can not manage shares on this device from a Windows 2003 Server?  Is that true?

 

Darin

[Matt_M]

dmchenry wrote:

 

So correct me if I am wrong.  You are saying that NTFS can not be utilized from a windows permission aspect then.  In other words I can not manage shares on this device from a Windows 2003 Server?  Is that true?

 

Darin

 

 

This is correct, you will not be able to simply right-click on a folder and in the properties apply security settings. The Linkstation Pro is running on XFS and as such cannot retain the NTFS file permissions from the 2003 server system. Instead what you would do is go into the web GUI on the NAS and in the "Shared Folder" section click on one of your shares, in the share property there is a section for access restrictions you can apply restrictions on the folder here based on users and groups. If the unit is joined to your domain you can even do this using your existing domain accounts. Now, this does have its limitations as you can only do this on root level folders, sub-folders cannot be managed in this way.

 

Hope this clarifies the issue