ntfsclone Wrapper To Make Windows Backups More Reliable

Issue

The Windows backups get failed randomly because of the inconsistent file system even when you are absolutely sure that before taking backups the file system is clean. 

The reason is taking a snapshot on the 'live' files system that is actively used, almost always causes degradation of the files system on the snapshot.

Cluster accounting failed at 22502 (0x57e6): missing cluster in $Bitmap

ERROR: Filesystem check failed! Windows wasn't shutdown properly or inconsistent filesystem. Please run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot it TWICE.

Fatal: Execution of ntfsclone -q -s -O /onapp/backups/m/e/mehxeoqqhrcnti /dev/sde1 > /tmp/onapp-tmp-ntfsclone-sdk.log 2>&1 || ( cat /tmp/onapp-tmp-ntfsclone-sdk.log; rm -f /tmp/onapp-tmp-ntfsclone-sdk.log; exit 1 ) failed

Resolution

Start to use a new feature Backup Plugin System that enables integration OnApp with a third-party service for backup management.

In case it's not an option for you, then as an alternative solution, we can use the ntfsclone wrapper based on dd utility to take backups, restore, and provisioning.

Now the backup tasks will always complete successfully regardless of the file system state (considering that there are no other issues that may cause failures).

Download the ntfsclone wrapper and install it on the backup server or hypervisors in case there are no backup servers in the cloud.

https://bitbucket.org/onappcore/support-tools-public/raw/4663e40f97dd20d72d118326d50e02fe977f0135/ntfsclone-wrp.sh

On the compute resources:

#curl -s https://bitbucket.org/onappcore/support-tools-public/raw/e86b6a44a4f1857b9fb8bfe91085e08caa1130fb/ntfsclone-wrp.sh | tee - > ntfsclone-wrp.sh
#NTFSCLONE_PATH=`which ntfsclone`
#mv $NTFSCLONE_PATH $NTFSCLONE_PATH.orig
#cp ntfsclone-wrp.sh $NTFSCLONE_PATH
#chmod +x $NTFSCLONE_PATH

Change the following variables in the script if it's needed:

TMPL_PATH="/onapp/templates/"
BKP_PATH="/onapp/backups/"
DD_BS="64MB"
SPARSE=false
COMPR=true

To make the changes permanent on CloudBoot compute resources:

On the Control Panel locate the compute resource's tftpboot config directory by its mac address and copy there the ntfsclone wrapper.

 #/tftpboot/images/centos5/diskless/snapshot/<mac_address>/

Then add these commands to compute resource custom config:

NTFSCLONE_PATH=`which ntfsclone`
mv $NTFSCLONE_PATH $NTFSCLONE_PATH.orig
cp /.rw/ntfsclone-wrp.sh $NTFSCLONE_PATH
chmod +x $NTFSCLONE_PATH

Run these commands manually or reboot the CR to apply the changes.