SBS 2008 restarts unexpectedly when backup starts

Today, our SBS 2008 server restarted itself at 5:00 p.m. sharp. I mean on the dot.

That was disturbing enough in itself. When the system came back up, it helpfully asked me to type in “Why did the system shut down unexpectedly?” and I enthusiastically typed in “Fuck if I know you jackass.” Then, I headed straight for the event log.

The event log was full of terrifying messages such as

The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

or

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR2  during a paging operation.

Hmm. There was no blue screen, no bug check, no minidump. It was as if the power had been cut.

I looked accusingly at the UPS since I have had problems with bad UPSs interrupting the power supply in the past. I held down its self-test button, it made that satisfying buzzing noise, and … everything stayed up.

But while crouched down next to the UPS, I heard an odd swishing noise, like a tiny man was running his finger across a sheet of Saran Wrap. Then I noticed that the external Western Digital hard drive that we use for SBS 2008 backup was doing its swooshing-lights mode, not its solid-lights mode, and I knew from previous experience that it only did that when it was starting up or shutting down.

I had a hunch–in SBS 2008, backup uses Volume Shadow Copy, and I had seen similar disk errors when another of our external hard drives cooked itself (though instead of rebooting, that server became unresponsive). I unplugged the external drive and the event log messages stopped.

I then promptly threw the external hard drive into the trash, drove straight to Best Buy and bought a new external hard drive with the company credit card. (Aside: Why do 90% of external hard drives come with craptastic backup software or “one-touch” buttons? I just want a drive in a box. I finally found one in the “Seagate Expansion” line.)

Then I plugged in the new external hard drive and re-ran the “Configure server backup” wizard from the SBS 2008 console. I unchecked the old, now non-existent drive, checked the new one, and off it went. And all seems happy now. (I ran chkdsk for good measure on the system and data drives and they checked out OK, so it does all seem related to the external backup drive cooking itself.)

Should it be capable of handling faulty backup hardware more gracefully? Sure. And I wish that SBS 2008 had the option to use the old ntbackup utility because then at least you could backup to network-attached storage. It’s been my experience that external hard drives really are not that reliable and have an average lifespan of only about two years, but maybe I have just been glaring at them the wrong way.