So I have several smaller issues that added up to a larger one, it’s a long story.
So basically, for a long time my urbackup server wouldn’t work unless I copied the IP address manually to the client discovery hints. This worked for a while on all my devices, except now on my main desktop the client won’t connect to the server anymore. To add more complications, I’ve had issues with my desktop nvidia drivers causing it to crash and ended up doing a system restore to fix that, which caused the windows install to be corrupted. So I did a repair install to fix that.
This is just background info because now my only issue left on my desktop is that it still won’t connect to the urbackup server. I doubt it’s Windows at this point because everything else is fixed now.
I also think this issue started after my internet was having issues and I had to reset the router, not after my Windows install got messed up.
I tried opening the debug.log but I don’t have permission - is there some special way of opening it, or could this be part of the issue?
I have the IP address in the client discovery hints but it’s still not connecting anymore. Client says server is unreachable. Any ideas? Thanks.
My guess would be that you have the network classified as “public” now. Maybe switching it to home/private network fixes this.
Another option is to just use the Internet mode locally. Put in the server IP or hostname (or hoverever clients can reach the server), make sure it is enabled (and restarted), then make sure the clients have the IP/hostname to connect to.
Network is set to private. I think I’m already doing that as I have Enable backup via internet checked on the client that has issues and the server ip in there with “urbackup://” before. Do I need to include a : and the port number afterwards? Or should that be good enough? Thanks. I also just noticed that in client discovery hints, it does show the ip of the client that is having issues as yes for being online, but the clients shows it is not online. And for the clients that are online, it shows the client as online but the client discovery hints say no for the same ip as the client that is connected. Should I remove the client discovery hints? Are they somehow causing issues? Because for some reason it wouldn’t work before unless I added them, so maybe that lead to this issue long term.
I don’t understand why when the client hints only show my desktop being online when it can’t connect to the server and when my other clients connect they say no for the client hints but connect. Is this normal behavior or is something wrong where the status of the client discovery hints is mismatched with the status of the actual clients? And is that at all related to this? I’m at a loss as to what the issue is since the client discovery hints seem to see my desktop.
I still haven’t solved this issue. I checked the debug.log file in the client that isn’t working and it shows a bunch of these with different numbers:
2026-09-07 12:54:01: WARNING: Parent of file with FRN 49258120924401093 (Name “00AF000000008DC510F01612”) with FRN 281474976710685 not found. Searching via MFT as fallback.
2026-09-07 12:54:01: WARNING: Parent directory not found in MFT. Was probably deleted.
2026-09-07 12:55:01: WARNING: Parent of directory with FRN 844424930153216 (Name “00030000000053000B895422”) with FRN 281474976710685 not found. Searching via MFT as fallback.
2026-09-07 12:55:01: WARNING: Parent not found. Was probably deleted.
2026-09-07 12:55:01: WARNING: Parent of directory with FRN 844424930153216 (Name “00030000000053000B895422”) with FRN 281474976710685 not found. Searching via MFT as fallback.
2026-09-07 12:55:01: WARNING: Parent not found. Was probably deleted.
Idk what this means but I’d appreciate any help. 99% sure that the internet outage was what caused this to happen but if the software is erroring maybe the restore somehow messed up the client install? Idk.
Still haven’t found a solution but I noticed the port changed from 55414 to 36577. Maybe this happened when my internet went out but maybe it affected it specifically with my desktop but the other devices were able to find it.
I changed to Public network and restarted urbackupsrv just to see if that would resolve it and it failed so I changed it back to Private but I’m not sure what’s going on.
Do I have to reinstall the client? What can I do at this point. This is my main PC so it’s vital to have backups working mainly for this device.
I also noticed the last time the server_idents.txt file has been modified is the date that it stopped working, and there’s a new_server_idents.txt dated the same. And session_idents.txt is also dated the same And the other clients update those files every time it connects. I added the debug.log file that shows a bunch of errors it seems.
So maybe when my PC was crashing it caused corruption in the urbackup client? Idk what else this could be.
Would running UrbackupUpdate.exe update the client to the latest version and would that help if there’s software corruption on the client side?
It looks like we have similar issues. Let me share my finding about that.
You have to launch Notepad as administrator. You can do that by right-clicking on C:\Windows\notepad.exe and selecting “Run as administrator.” You can then open the debug log file from C:\Program Files\UrBackupby opening it from Notepad’s File menu.
Use a URL with this format: ws://yoururbackupserverip/fqdn:55414/socket. If you have a DNS zone configured for your local subnet, I believe, you have to make make sure that the reverse lookup for the IP address you set as a discovery hint produces a host name matched in the Computer name field on the Client tab of the client settings. This may be irrelevant, but doing so can’t hurt. I will get back to verifying that assertion, once I get my setup to work reliably, by putting in something mismatching.
I am not sure, what you mean by that. Where did you find a benefit in change the port from 55414 to 36577?
Section 10.3 of the current manual lists these ports: 55413, 55414, 55415, and 35623. I have a remote client successfully backing up to my NAS running the UrBackup Docker app with my internet gateway only forwarding the first three to the NAS. I would conclude that Port 35623 is only used on the local network.
Likewise Ports 35621, 35622, and 35623 must be used only for backup of clients on the same local subnet as the server. I have not forwarded those ports to the NAS.
Coming from a macOS/Unix world this public/private dichotomy has stumped me more than once. Usually by not setting the network to “Private” when local hosts were to access a Windows host. Seems like a bolt-on rather than compliance with established best practices from the Unix world, where IP networks and associated protocols first emerged.