This is a bit of a hit in the dark hoping that someone here may have a clue as to the cause.
Occasionally my server computer will crash with a BSOD and I have been trying to track this down for a while. It has only started since I installed URBackup server some months ago and here are the details as best I can can come up with.
It happens roughly about 3 weeks or so apart. Whenever it does I check the Windows Minidump file and it has almost always been said to have been caused by a program called Networx I have been using for years to monitor internet activity on each the computers on my home network. (This small app needs to reside on each of the computers and they exchange data between them about internet down and uploads etc…)
Now this program has worked fine for a very long time and no I have not changed anything here (it is a free offering up to the version i have and I don’t rally feel like having to pay for something that was supposed to be free previously!)
I have a suspicion that the server crash only happens when URBackup does a backup of one particular computer on my network, but only on the occasional backup, not every time.
It is unfortunately like one of the worst nightmares of any repair technician, it is intermittent and never happens in a way you can track down easily. I have a theory though that URBackup and Networx may clash at odd times in trying to communicate with the same computer Beyond that my abilities as an old analog techie get the better of me. It may be a long shot, but I just wondered if anyone here might recognise the symptoms and be able to suggest a solution or at least something to look for.
Check disks SMART status where is backup location. Will be fine if you show it here.
I assume what you are suggesting artyomtsybulkin is that I should check the integrity of the hard drives involved. Particularly their SMART status and particularly also the drive the backup is being saved to.
Well I do keep a careful preventive check on all hard drives in our home network as I have had some embarrassing failures at times. The drive where the backup files are stored is a fairly old one (8 years and almost 5000 hours) but it is currently showing as very good in all tests using Seagate Seatools and the Western Digitals own drive tester, but I will replace it as soon as I can afford it! The drive in the one computer I think may be at the centre of the problem is less than a year old and also very good.
But a hard drive problem doesn’t seem to fit with the other symptoms. It happens about every 3 weeks and always involving the same sort of process. It also seems to happen when URBackup is doing a image or file backup of one computer - but not every time it does such a backup. I am backing up 4 other computers on the same set up, but they do not seem to cause this problem.
You could try updating the network drivers on the problem client, or restricting the backup speed for that machine to see if it helps, I have in the past had issues where a network driver would crash during backups and that cured it…
It’s hard to be more specific without more details of the actual crash event. 3 weeks is an extended interval but also an odd one, if it was a little longer I’d suspect old software overrunning a 32 bit integer on uptime I have some myself that crashes regularly for that reason at about 48 day intervals, although I suppose something similar could be happening with total tracked traffic rather than uptime in that network monitoring software if it’s really old… it may be worth looking at the totals towards the time it happens.
Thanks for the suggestions Bearded Blunder.
I realise my information is a bit thin on, but that’s only because it is a very hard one to track down. Still you have given me some clues I will try out in the near future/in the fullness of time!!!