Can't backup to FireWire-connected drive

[Troy Meyers]

I'm trying to set up FileMaker Server 9 Advanced on a brand new Mac Mini (still Tiger) and I'm unable to specify a FireWire-connected external drive as the backup destination. Is this not possible?

When I specify the path it comes up as "Not a valid path". I've played extensively with naming and permissions to no avail, but obviously I'm doing something wrong.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

External drives are not supported as targets for backups in this fashion.

And I hope youi're not using that mini Mac as a mission critical server.

Steven

[Troy Meyers]

Steven, thanks for the reply.

Does this mean I can't back up to anything but the internal startup drive? That doesn't seem to protect against drive death.

Yes, if running our web site and business is "mission critical" then I am. We are a conservation group with a very limited budget, and the Mini was what we could afford. Why specifically are you voicing concern?

-Troy

Edited November 9, 2007 by Guest

[corn]

Volumes on firewire drives can work as backup destinations, provided you have done all of the following.

1) The volume must be formatted with an HFS filesystem. FAT32 and NTFS will not work.

2) You must enable permissions on the drive. Choose "Get Info" on the drive in the Finder and uncheck the option to "Ignore ownership on this volume"

3) The 'fmserver' owner or 'fmsadmin' group must minimally have read access to the volume and all folders along the path to the destination folder.

4) The 'fmserver' owner or 'fmsadmin' group must have read/write access to the destination folder.

When configuring the backup path the format you need to use is:

filemac:/VolumeName/pathname/destinationFolderName/

[Steven H. Blackwell]

and the Mini was what we could afford. Why specifically are you voicing concern?

Because its drives are prone to failure, especially if they are made by Seagate.

Steven

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Corn, does this actually work when using the Server backup schedule?

Steven

[corn]

Corn, does this actually work when using the Server backup schedule?

This does indeed work for FMS 9. I have not verified that it works with FMS 8 or earlier.

[Troy Meyers]

Corn,

This makes me hopeful, but I thought I had tried this. I'm not exactly sure if the external FireWire drive is HFS, when I erased it for this purpose, I selected "MacOS Extended (Journaled)" [color:blue]without the "Install MacOS9 Disk Driver" option selected.

Then, when I first did Get Info on the newly formatted drive, I did uncheck "Ignore ownership on this volume", and THOUGHT I did the 'fmserver' and 'fmsadmin' settings, but perhaps I didn't do them right. Can you tell me step by step how to accomplish them?

Thank you!

-Troy

Volumes on firewire drives can work as backup destinations, provided you have done all of the following.

1) The volume must be formatted with an HFS filesystem. FAT32 and NTFS will not work.

2) You must enable permissions on the drive. Choose "Get Info" on the drive in the Finder and uncheck the option to "Ignore ownership on this volume"

3) The 'fmserver' owner or 'fmsadmin' group must minimally have read access to the volume and all folders along the path to the destination folder.

4) The 'fmserver' owner or 'fmsadmin' group must have read/write access to the destination folder.

When configuring the backup path the format you need to use is:

filemac:/VolumeName/pathname/destinationFolderName/

[Troy Meyers]

I just checked, and this one has a 111.79GB Hitachi hard disk. Fingers crossed. If I could make an external backup...

Because its drives are prone to failure, especially if they are made by Seagate.

Steven

[xochi]

Corn, does this actually work when using the Server backup schedule?

Steven

Works for me too. The only time I can't get backups to work is on a mounted DMG, but external drives (FW and USB) work fine, provided permissions are set correctly.

[corn]

Corn, does this actually work when using the Server backup schedule?

I should point out that I don't currently use this configuration for backup of my FMS 9 development server. Instead I use backup software to archive the FMS backups to the external drive. My interest in configuring FMS to write directly to the external drive was only that some people had claimed it could not be done and I sought to determine if not then why not.

[Troy Meyers]

Corn,

I can't seem to get it to work. What version MacOS have you tried this under? The machine I'm trying on is MacOS 10.4.10, a new Mac Mini with Intel duo, 2GHz.

I'd pay to have someone help me successfully get this set up.

It sure could be a permissions issue, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Perhaps it's significant that it used to work (different Mini) with FMS8A to the same FireWire-connected external drive, but stopped working (stopped successfully doing the backups, path became "invalid") on or around the time I did the AirPortExtremeUpdate2007003.pkg and SecUpd2007-005Univ.pkg updates on that machine.

Corn, can you or anyone else help? My email: [email protected]

-Troy

I should point out that I don't currently use this configuration for backup of my FMS 9 development server. Instead I use backup software to archive the FMS backups to the external drive. My interest in configuring FMS to write directly to the external drive was only that some people had claimed it could not be done and I sought to determine if not then why not.

[Troy Meyers]

Xochi, I'd appreciate your help too. What I said to Corn goes for you too. Thanks!

-Troy

Works for me too. The only time I can't get backups to work is on a mounted DMG, but external drives (FW and USB) work fine, provided permissions are set correctly.

[Troy Meyers]

I'm still unable so solve this. Can anyone suggest a consultant that I can purchase assistance from, or how to get ahold of someone at FileMaker for the same?

[Troy Meyers]

My problem has been solved. I can use the FireWire drive connected to the Mac Mini Intel for backup using FMS9A.

There may be a bug in FileMaker Server that makes this difficult, but it is possible and it is working for me.

Corn helped, he used a technology similar to VNC to remotely check things on the Mini running FMS9A. First he verified that I had set the permissions correctly on the external FireWire drive, and apparently I had. Then he used Terminal to more carefully check to make sure what was being shown in Get Info was really true -- it was.

Then he tried putting in a backup path in the FileMaker Server Admin Console. He had the same problem as I did - the path comes up as "Not a valid path".

(Corn, please correct me if I've got the sequence wrong --)

Then he solved it simply by stopping Web Publishing, then stopping Database Server, and then starting Database Server and Web Publishing again, all this done using FileMaker Server Admin Console.

Once that was done, clicking the Validate button in any of the path specification boxes now brought "Valid path" as the status, and looking at the files produced in the backup folders confirms that actual backups were done.

HOWEVER, restarting the machine apparently brings the problem back. The paths again become "not valid" and the manual stopping and starting of the server using Admin Console must again be done to make the paths appear valid.

Doesn't this seem like a bug in Server? Surely you should be able to restart the machine and not have to go through this....

Thank you to Corn for all his help.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

You and/or Corn might wish to report this to FMI ASAP.

Steven

[Troy Meyers]

Steven, thanks, I just did, using

http://www.filemaker.com/company/problems.html

I hope that's the best way.

-Troy

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Yes it is. They are all gone this whole week, more or less, but I will flag this to their attention.

Steven

[Troy Meyers]

Steven, thank you very much!

-Troy

[genevieve charbon]

And I hope youi're not using that mini Mac as a mission critical server.

Can you elaborate on this, because if you think that you'd require a Mac Pro like the FMS documentation lets you think it, in my experience I've never, since the FM 5 days (and to FMS 9 too), saw FMS actually using the hardware.

I mean,in the worst condition, the CPU usage of FMS never used more than 30% of the CPU (actually it's more like 10% or less in normal situation).

I do regret that a lot, but to me FMS doesn't use hardware at all, so hardware is a loss of money in my experience.

Moreover I'm in the process of deciding myself Mac Pro vs Mac Mini. My issue is that I run several very intensive scripts (yes they involve import export)

The fastest way I found so far that also allows to have the database available on the network, is to put a client that will run the intensive script on the same machine as the server.

Yes that'as again the lying rules.

In that situation I got the server to peg 50% of ONE CPU of a Mac Pro, the second CPU was 60% with the client.

The script was two times slower vs standalone execution.

Then I ran the intensive script from a Mac Book Pro 2Ghz on the network. It took 3 times the time of server + client on same machine. Yes that's 6 times slower than standalone.

So, in my experience FMS performance just sucks

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Physical drive integrity is the critical issue here. And the mini Mac's drives aren't all that good.

Steven

[Jason Tallman]

Steven,

Do you have some actual data to backup your claim that a Mac Mini hard drive has poor physical drive integrity? Furthermore Filemaker Server isn't even supported on Apple's currently shipping mission critical server hardware (Xserve pre-installed with Leopard Server). So how are we supposed to buy mission critical server hardware when it isn't even supported by Filemaker?

Jason

[Troy Meyers]

FYI all,

FMI has contacted me regarding the FireWire issue, and while they haven't been able to reproduce it, I easily can here, and they may use remote methods to witness it.

-Troy

[corn]

It's not the Mac Mini per se but the drives used in the Mac Mini. One particular drive, manufactured in China for Seagate, has experienced a high rate of premature failure and catastrophic data loss. These 2.5" drives just are not made for continuous use that a server imposes.

Until recently the only choice for continuous use hard drives has been SCSI. With the advent of the SATA interface some vendors (Western Digital in particular) have offered a server-grade SATA drive that is rated for continuous use. SATA-II provides nearly the performance of SCSI (with NCQ and buffered transactions) at a fraction of the cost. This makes the WD drives in a RAID array a very attractive choice for server installs.

Note that catastrophic data loss can happen at any time. Using server-class hardware reduces the risk of such an occurrence. You can certainly use a Mac Mini as your server, Seagate drives included, if you have a comprehensive data backup and recovery plan and can tolerate a little downtime should a drive failure occur. If uptime is your paramount concern then server class hardware is a necessity.

[Troy Meyers]

Here's an update on the problem.

We just changed our FMS9A deployment from the one-machine to the two-machine deployment. There is no longer a problem with backup paths to the external FireWire drive becoming invalid after the master server machine is rebooted.

I don't see how this makes any sense, but I guess there's always a twist in how bugs crop up.

[Andreas T.]

I have the same issue now on a clients FMS 8v4, and I have had it before from time to time on external drives since FMS 7.

I can for the life of me not understand why we can't get a simple file selector, I mean, they have been around for over 20 years...

This manual method gives me the DOS shudders all over again.

We all have too much on our hands to be bothered by something so simple as to specify a folder. This is crappy interfacing from Filemaker. At best.

Sorry for ranting, but I now have to do a cron job to do this. Which of course works, but is harder for the client to manage.

Cheers,

Andreas

[Steven H. Blackwell]

FileMaker has said that there will be an updater for FileMaker Server 9 to run on Leopard Server. They have said that they plan to release it early in the coming year.

There are options other than the xServe with SAS (not SATA) drives to run FileMaker Server, including the other Intel towers where SAS or SCSI drives can be used in lieu of the default SATA drives.

As recently as the last developer conference, the head Server engineer specifically cautioned about the use of consumer type drives. The Server configutation White paper discusses this as does the Server Tech Brief as does the Professional Training Series information.

Steven