Encrypting mirror backup of network files

[gmerritt]

I've had extrememly good success with your product and appreciate the continued support and improvements!

I'm having some trouble with an encrypted mirror backup, however, and I'm not sure which direction to take yet. I am trying to perform an encrypted mirror backup (fast mirror) of a network drive. That is, from my desktop -- I am trying to back up a network drive (Windows environment) -- onto a portable USB drive that's connected to my desktop. (To illustrate, B4A is running on my desktop. I'm backing up a mapped network drive to an external USB drive that's attached to the desktop.) When I do this without encryption I have no problem. When I try to encrypt the backup, it doesn't work. That is, it attempts to complete the backup but I can't read any of the files. Ironically I can read files that are backed up (encrypted) from my local desktop to teh USB drive, but I cannot open encrypted files that are coming from the mapped network drive. Is there anything I need on the server? The server where my mapped network drive is located is Windows Server 2003.

I hope that explanation was satsifactory... Help!

Thanks

[Adrian (Softland)]

Hi,

What is the error message you receive when trying to open the encrypted files?

[gmerritt]

Hi, thanks for the response. I'm using 7-zip to try and open the files, and the Diagnostic message it returns is "Cannot open file <file path/name> as archive". Oddly enough, I'm able to open some files but not others -- I don't even see a pattern yet (that is, I've tried Excel, PDF, Word -- some I can open some I can't).

I'm considering just deleting the entire backup and starting over... This is a fast mirror backup, so I'm not picking up files that haven't changed anyway.

Thanks again --

[Claudiu (Softland)]

Hi, thanks for the details. When the backup finished with Backup4all, did the test show any errors for the mirror backup that now has corrupt zip files (see in View-Job Logs-Last Test log)? And can you try a zip file that can't be opened by 7Zip with another utility such as Winzip? The error you receive seems to be related to some of the zip files having corrupt headers, if there's a possibility to repeat the backup it would be great to do it and let us know if it happens again - we'll do some tests to try to reproduce it here too, however a possible problem might be the connection to the network (did it interrupt for a little during the backup?).

[gmerritt]

Thanks again for the quick response... You bring up some interesting points so let me see if I can address them:

1. There's nothing in the log file that I can see indicating an error or warning -- of course, I don't have any older logs that might give me some warning. (I'm only doing fast mirrors so it's actually not picking up some of those files that are corrupted. That actually does bring up the idea of trying to re-backup just those files that were corrupted initially by changing them and forcing the fast mirror to pick them up. But I don't actually know the extent to which the corruption has taken place -- so I may just do a full backup all over again.)
2. I can't open the zip file in 7Zip, nor can I open it with Windows Compressed Folders. However, I did try opening with WinZip and got this error:
Extracting to "C:\Users\gmerritt\AppData\Local\Temp\"
Use Path: no Overlay Files: yes
skipping: CLIN2001AAProject_V2.pdf unsupported compression method 99
error: no files were found - nothing to do
Turns out the file isn't empty (at least it's not 0kb in size) -- so I assume there is some corruption.
3. I will probably try and do a new full backup tomorrow -- it takes a good while (many files) so I need to let it run for a while.
4. To the best of my recollection there was no network issue of any kind during the backup -- although something could have happened while I was away from my desk I suppose (no errors were reported, though).

Hope that helps -- thank you again.

[Claudiu (Softland)]

Hi, thank you too for giving these details, I did some tests now and it all worked ok on my side, can you let us know exactly what version of Backup4all you're using and also what OS so we could replicate the same environment? And do you have any antivirus/firewall installed (there's a small but existing possibility that an antivirus corrupts some zip files)?

[gmerritt]

Hello again! Just following up... I finally got around to doing a full mirror backup (erasing the older one mirror backup with fast mirror). This time it appears to have worked just fine. I've done a spot check on the same files that were corrupted before, and they open just fine. I'll keep searching to see if everything looks good, but this might have been resolved. Still -- it was an odd issue to have.
For the record, I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate -- Backup4All Professional Version 4.4 Build 196 -- with McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i. There's no firewall on while I'm on the LAN -- otherwise just the Windows firewall. I would wonder if the McAfee has any effect -- hard to say.

Thank you for your very responsive support..