Ed Bott Has More on the Data Corruption Bug

By on December 28, 2007 in Software, Windows Home Server

Ed Bott has more news on the data corruption bug, specifically the scenario in which the bug occurs and some behind the scenes context around the KB article – worth a read.

There’s been a huge amount of online vitriol poured out around this issue, which is probably to be expected given the seriousness of the bug, but also the time of year, with not a lot of other tech news happening. Some have been questioning the need to backup data on a backup product – I understand the logic, but personally, I’ve always kept a backup of my most important data (photos, music and software) on an external hard drive which is not attached to the home server, ever since my WHS beta days almost a year ago. Why? Well, at first, it was extra protection required for running a beta product. Nowadays, it’s just good practice - copying data to an external hard drive is very easy to do once in a while, so why wouldn’t you?

Do I trust Windows Home Server with my data? More than any other v1 Microsoft product I’ve used. Thankfully I’ve not had any data corruption issues since starting with WHS Beta 2. But would I blindly trust any product 100% with my music collection, wedding photos, holiday snaps? No, and neither should you. If you’re running Windows Home Server without surge protection, without a UPS, without a “doomsday” backup tucked away, then sort it out – now! Windows Home Server provides most homes with the first layer of backup protection, which is fantastic. Software such as Jungle Disk and Keep Vault’s online backup adds a second. I like to also have a third – and it’s on that Maxtor External Hard Drive.

Back to the bug – to date, Ed has the most up to date news – as MVPs, we’ve got the same information as everyone else right now. To be honest, I’ve deliberately not sought out updates from the team, as it’s better for them to be 100% focused on fixing the bug as quickly as possible. With a bug like this, when there’s news to share, it’ll be shared quickly.

We (the WHS MVPs, that is) have our regular monthly update call with the WHS team on Jan 2nd (to which all Microsoft MVPs are invited this month, by the way) at which I hope to hear more. Fingers crossed the fix is already in place by then, but stay tuned for any updates in the meantime.


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • http://randomelements.me.uk Colin Walker

    Terry,

    Now, you or I know that it’s best to run a separate backup but WHS is being marketed as THE solution. Joe Public is going to be buying WHS as their backup point and will not expect to have to buy additional hardware on top of that. If it cannot be guaranteed that all data will be intact then what’s the point of buying WHS if you are going to be doing manual backups anyway.

    Just my thoughts.

  • Nick

    Terry,

    Thanks for keeps us updated. Can’t wait for the your update on the 2nd.

    Have a Great New Year!.

    Nick

    PS: keep up the great site.

  • Terry Walsh

    Happy New Year to you too Nick!

    Terry

  • http://www.totalcarecc.com Kevin Royalty SBS MVP

    Terry – don’t know if you read slashdot at all or not, but there is a post yesterday 12/27 that is full of incorrect facts about this bug, and the MS-haters are having a field day with it. http://www.slashdot.org

  • Terry Walsh

    Hi Kevin

    No, I don’t usually read Slashdot, but I did place a response on there this morning with links through to Ed B’s post and here. I fear it may be squashed in a sea of anti-MS vitriol, but my sense is there’s more than a little bandwagon-jumping going on over there. Hopefully, most WHS users by now know where to get facts rather than opinion…. ;)

    Thanks for the heads up,
    Terry

  • GaMeR™

    I’m not a MS fanboy nor a Linux guru. But I’ve used both and made my own conclusion that I like MS products.

    I’ve had a Gentoo Server for a while and it worked flawlesly. But with WHS I have more options and is just as stable becouse it’s software roots have proven itself (Win 2k3).

    However, I understand the problem and what the fault seems to be. I’ve had data corruption, but only in the torrents I downloaded. What I am wondering is if this fault is also in the Beta’s and CTP because I’ve never tested downloading torrents directly to the shares. But if not, what changed?

  • LibbyLoo

    I saw Ed’s column yesterday while browsing for more info on the bug other than what was posted in Microsoft’s KB. The article really put my mind at ease that the corruption is fairly hard to duplicate and may be isolated to a particular set of circumstances. For the short term I have suspended use of the Windows Live Photo Gallery (which I really like) and Sync Toy 2.0 beta. I’ve not had any corruption issues, but also agree with Terry about having a level-2 and level-3 backup plan in case of a fire or hardware failure. I still trust WHS with my videos and photos as much as any other device I’ve ever used. Just like Kevin commented – this is fuel for the MS haters to trash a great product.

  • http://mywoodfamily.us Walter Wood

    Many months ago as a beta tester for WHS I reported a bug that exhibited the same symptoms as are now being reported. I had a program that stored passwords files on WHS so they could be shared locally. WHS corrupted this file to the point it could not be opened. This bug report was closed and basically I was told this was this was not the purpose that WHS was being developed for. As a result I learned not to work off WHS but on local drives.

    Fast forward to last month, same issue but different software. At my workplace they use Windows Server. Recently IT required us to move our Outlook Personal Folders off of the servers to our local drives. By way of explanation they provided a copy of an MS white paper that indicated you should/could expect file corruption due to the fact that space had to be allocated on the fly when adding or deleting messages. (I don’t have the reference in front of me since I am off over the holidays.)

    Then just two days ago I was resetting my wife’s WinXP desktop. It had been causing a few problems so I wiped it clean and reinstalled. Before starting, I copied many of the drivers and programs needed for the reinstall onto WHS for easy access. When I tried to reinstall an HP all-in-one printer program (300MB) I found it was corrupted. The program would quickly open and close a DOS window and then exit. Was this caused by WHS or something else? This behavior was exactly as described in one of the comments to Ed Bott’s article so I suspect WHS.

    BTW earlier this week I installed the WHS trial edition on a new (to me) computer and reloaded my files from scratch. At this point I plan on only copying files to WHS and allowing the backups to run. However at some time soon it would be nice to be able to trust WHS enough to actually share working files and my music and photos are mirrored to one of my desktops.

    Walter

  • Colin Hodgson

    I can well believe it’s difficult to replicate! I’ve been running all the Betas and now have the RC & the OEM both running. Since the RC, I haven’t had any file corruption whatsoever. The OEM server has all sorts of M/S Office 2003/2007 files stored on it, with these being opened – worked on – closed, from 3 Vista machines and 5 XP machines. I don’t use either Money or Quicken, so cannot comment on those, but I’m more than happy with my setup.
    In a way, I would ‘normally’ do the usual, and not use any new software until SP1 and WHS is re-enforcing this “wait and see”. It was the potential of WHS that drew me into it at the beginning, and even with hindsight, I’m happy with that decision. I just feel sympathy with the people who are experiencing the corruption effects.

    Colin

  • Tim Lang

    Walter,

    Is it possible that your HP installer .exe file got tagged by WHS as a potentially dangerous file? This is a very annoying behaviour in Windows Server 2003 R2 where executables copied to the server from a network share cannot be run. In order to fix this, right click on the .exe file and down at the bottom of the file property window (beneath the “Read Only” checkbox), there should be a button you can click on to “Unprotect” the file, and then it can run properly.

    I am not sure if that would be the cause of your problem, or if it was in fact corrupted, but it is definitely something to check.

  • Terry Walsh

    Hi Colin W

    Apologies, your comment hit the spam filter for some reason… I guess right now, using WHS is a far more comprehensive backup strategy than most multi-pc homes have right now. Certainly, I didn’t back up any of my PCs before it arrived, and now I do so at the very least, there will be a lot more people doing Layer 1 backups with the product.

    But (and I think I use this phrase a fair amount), it’s a v1 product, which has been designed to be extensible so that companies like KeepVault and JungleDisk can add-in their services – if MS tied you into a Windows Live-based solution for online backup, they’d get hit very quickly with (more) anti-competition legislation I’m sure.

    Personally, I would like to see more communication in the application to encourage users to take manual backups on to an external hard drive, and maybe find a way (potentially wizard based?) to do that through the console rather than through Windows Explorer. Who knows what the future holds in v2, 3, 4 etc.

    Cheers
    Terry

  • Ian

    This will be interesting over time, what happens to the people who have saved data onto the WHS and don’t look at it for a year only to find corruptions everywhere, I think as time goes on more and more people will find they have the problem as they start using older documents.

    There are a couple of online backup programs like Jungle disk but what is the point as the data in the shared folders would be corrupted before uploading?

    I don’t have unlimited data upload speed and data allowance so Online backups are a problem, is there anything I can run on WHS to backup that is not expensive Business grade software. I would like to backup to a USB drive to take off site but how do I do that for the files on WHS?

  • Terry Walsh

    Currently, you can’t save your backups to an external drive in v1, but you can save your shared folders to an external hard drive. Just plug the drive into one of your home computers, access the shared folders on your home server and then copy them to the external drive.

    Terry

  • Malcolm Hegarty

    Terry,

    Can you advise a UPS solution that will shut down WHS in a controlled manner in the event of a power failure?

    Also, is there any way to have WHS duplicate the backups to an external hard drive? I have a HP MediaSmart EX475 which is currently duplicating backups to the second hard drive but I woul also like the have it save the backups to an external hard drive if possible.

  • Malcolm Hegarty

    Apologies, I somehow missed your last repsonse that there is no automatic way to save backups to an external drive on WHS v1.

    Incidentally, backup-wise (before installing my WHS) I had a shared folder on my main Vista machine which automatically backed up to external hard drive – like Ian my data uploading speed is very limited indeed. This appears to have been a better backup solution than the WHS in that at least I had my data on two separate devices.

  • Terry Walsh

    Hi Malcolm,

    In terms of a UPS, I use the APC Back-UPS BE-700 (UK). Check out: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/2007/06/17/how-to-install-a-battery-back-up-power-supply-to-your-windows-home-server/ – you can use this in conjunction with the bundled APC software (which is meant fro XP but seems to work fine on WHS) or just configure shutdown through WHS’ Power Settings (using RDC). WHS treats the UPS as a battery, so it can be configured without the software if need be.

    On the external backup thing – it’s a feature that has been high on the community request list for a while, and I know the product team are aware of it. Fingers crossed it could appear in a future release, who knows?

    Best wishes
    Terry

  • http://mywoodfamily.us Walter Wood

    To Tim

    >>Is it possible that your HP installer .exe file got tagged by WHS as a potentially dangerous file?

    Since I downloaded the file and copyied it over the old one I have no way of checking this. I did note however that the old file dsiplayed a generic icon while the new one showed the correct icon. I checked the original file that was stored on my primary desktop and it also displayed the generic icon so it is probable that the corruption occurred prior to moving to WHS.

  • Malcolm Hegarty

    Hi Terry,

    Happy New Year to everyone and thanks to you and your team for the support and info this site provides.

    Re the tip on the UPS, I’ve ordered one from Amazon.co.uk, thanks for the info.

    I’ve copied my data folders over to the shared folders on my new HP MediaSmart Server and there appears to be a size discrepancy, e.g. Folder 1 on my Vista machine has a Size of 12.8MB and a Size On Disk of 13.3.MB but when the folder has been copied to the server it has a Size of 12.8MB and a Size On Disk of 976KB. The server disks don’t have compression turned on – can anyone tell me if this is normal?

    I don’t fully trust the server at the moment because of this (I’m wondering if it’s some sort of corruption).

  • kc

    I have transferred all my data to the WHS, and now I have to wonder whether their integrities. I can accept data lost due to fire, earthquake, or any others, but it is hard to swallow it happens during the normal usage. It would be safer without the WHS. I dont see WHS as a backup solution for the home. I consider it as the data central repository. I should be able to use it as any other NAS. Can Microsoft make a v1 product good enough to use for once? I should hold off my purchase of WHS till at least v3.