This is interesting stuff. This post is half question, half info.
For 2 weeks now I have been seeing my backups finish with a fail status. The jobs Complete, but say Failed. About two weeks ago, in addition to our LTO tape drive, I also connected a USB 4TB Seagate SATA drive to also do deduplication backups.
During the course of troubleshooting the backup failures I disabled this dedupe stroage device as an item in BE (keeping the drive connected though and showing in 2008 R2.)
Two things I have observed so far:
1. Connecting a drive automatically adds it to your backup Selections - I would have thought you had to add it manually. My Fully Selected server and VMs added this 4TB E: drive without even a prompt (interesting) - it would make more sense that it at least prompt you to confirm. Oh well.
2. Even with the dedupe storage device disabled, thus running a regular tape backup but unknowingly I also had the 4TB drive in Selections, it also fails - unable to snapshot various VMs even though they are not even stored on the 4TB drive
After some research I realized a drive such as this, that has only 4K native as it's sector format and no 512e (emulation), is not compatible with Server 2008 R2, only Server 2012. So I found http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH202992 which discusses the same issue. There appers to be no real fix for this, and while there is a link in there that leads to other suggested workarounds, I can't see that anybody in their right mind managing servers would try to make something incompatible function anyway so I'm about to just decide to use this HD elsewhere.
But before I make that final decision, I wondered if anybody on here has successfully put a 4k native drive to use in BE under 2008 R2 or is it simply not worth trying?
I guess a follow-up question might be - what could be an alternative option to using a USB-attached SATA drive for deduplication? This is a small business environment so SANs and all that are not an option - as I see it the only choice had been this 4TB drive. We're backing up about 1.7TB so to me, anything short of even 3TB is kind of pointless.
Thanks for any input.