Kicking and Screaming I am Bloggin

So you may have heard that Storage Craft just released 3.0, a new version of Shadow Protect. Since I had purchased maintenance for my clients when I sold them their original licenses, I received new license keys for them all this week. Having no life, especially on the weekends I decided to do the upgrades this weekend, and discovered a few gotcha’s that I thought I would share with you. Why does there always have to be a gotcha?

Anyways the first problem I was watching for as one of my group members (J.R Tatum of Performance Dimensions, Inc.) told me he ran into it, and asked me to watch for it to confirm it was not just something he was doing. It seems if you have Shadow Protect 2 or 2.5 already installed and you try to do an in-place upgrade, you get a bunch of vss errors that look like this.

You can resolve this by either uninstalling the previous version, and doing a clean install or if you have already done the upgrade and have the errors, you can just remove the new version in add/remove programs and install it clean. Either way it is happy after that.

I also tried an in-place on a member W2K3 Server and it upgraded just fine with no errors. It seems to only be the SBS Server that gets grumpy.

Now the next thing I noticed was all 3 of the servers that had CRM on them even if installed clean, got SQL-VDI errors when Shadow Protect ran. The good news is there is already a KB article that discusses this error it is KB934396  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934396/en-us, the bad news is you have to call in for the patch. Of note all these servers are running SBS 2003 SP1, J.R. said he had run into this earlier on his SBS R2 systems. You will know if you have this issue you will see this in your app log when Shadow Protect runs.

Once you have done a clean install and applied the hot fix if you need it, it works like a top.

This was the first image of my server with the new version, about 55 minutes to do the complete server, about 80Gigs of image files which is a bkf file of about 116.5 Gigs when backed up with the regular SBS Backup and takes 5.5 hours.