Hi Folks,
I tried to search for this topic but I didn’t find anything so I’m hoping this hasn’t been discussed before.
I have several clients using WD Passports of various sizes as their backup media. What we normally do with out clients is we give them two USB HD’s, and they swap them daily. Each drive then contains Monday/Wednesday/Friday backups on one device and Tuesday/Thursday on the second device. We prefer Passports because they are small, and easy to take off site for offsite data protection, and Western Digital have such an excellent track record in hard drives. But recently a problem has been occurring for many of them. This is what happens:
- Morning client comes in, unplugs the USB HD from the system.
- Client then plugs the other device into the computer.
- If client does nothing the backup fails, saying it cannot find the USB hard drive. But if the client then Open’s My Computer, and opens the USB HD it disappears and My Computer closes.
- The client reopens My Computer and the USB HD is gone.
- Wait for a few seconds for Microsoft to check for new devices and the USB HD comes back and the backup works just fine that evening.
- The next mornng the same thing happens all over again. It doesn’t matter which drive, it happens to both.
Here are the details:
OS: Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro SP3
Device: Passport
USB Ports: Back and front ports, it doesn’t matter.
Backup Software: Second Copy 2000, Second Copy 7 AND Second Copy 8.
I don’t believe it’s a problem with the Second Copy backup software as this happens before Second Copy does anything. The backups occur at 11:30 PM and the HD’s are usually changed by 9:00 A.M. Also we have a couple of clients with HP variations of the Passport and they don’t seem to be having the same issue.
The drives themselves seem to need a refresh. As I show above this problem originated on a Server 2003 system which caused me to move the backup in a couple of instances to a workstation running Windows XP Pro SP3. This worked great, but all of a sudden within the last three weeks its now started on the XP machine. Anyone out there have any idea’s what’s going on here? I could really use a hand as my clients are starting to have kittens over the buggy state of their backups. Thanks.
