Need help with replication task

[dbrannon79]

Hello all, I need some help fixing a replication task that was once working.

a little details on my systems. I have two rack servers one as the main and the second as a backup unit
the first is a Dell R720 with a pool of 8 disk named "main" within this pool I have several data sets which I have setup for different users along with some open to all on my network.

The second is an old Cisco C200 1u server with a pool of 4 disks named "Storage" this server is only used as a backup of all from the main server. I do have some smb shares setup so I can actually look at the files making sure they are backed up and there.

One of the things I did setup on the task was I utilized a separate Nic port on each server with a ethernet crossover cable giving each a static IP so the two servers could talk to each other without loading my entire network when backing up data. this seemed to work find at least on the first run of the replication task

on the Dell main server I have periodic snapshots setup for daily at midnight and are kept for 2 weeks (same settings for the other server) a replication task is setup to ssh into the Cisco server and push all data into it, it's scheduled to do this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3am.
I also have some scheduled smart tests setup for it as well as for the Cisco server but I think that is irrelevant to this problem though the schedule times are far away from when the replication takes place.

when I first set this replication task up it was all working or at least to my knowledge it was until I started getting fail notifications. when I looked I saw that the clock was off about 3 hours on the Cisco server, not sure what caused this, but I fixed it and manually started the snapshots task for both servers so they'd both have fresh ones with the same time.

after this I started the replication task and it showed completed without errors, BUT it did not copy over any new files into the Cisco server's pool. when I opened the folders in windows on my desktop I saw where I had added a ton of music into one of the media folders on the Dell and they were not there in the Cisco server (about 1tb worth of data)

without any errors to look at, what can I do to possibly fix this. I am honestly questioning if the replication has been pushing any data since the first run when it pushed everything at once.

if needed I can post some screen shots of the task settings if that helps.

I really appreciate any help here :)

 

[dbrannon79]

Update:

I started working with it today not sure where things went wrong. I ended up deleting all of the snapshots from both servers, then went back into the main (dell) UI and re-created the replication task using the exact same setting as before. when I attempted to run it manually the first time, it failed with an error showing it could not un-mount the pool from the backup server.

I stopped there and rebooted both servers and tried to run it again. this time I did not log into the backup servers web ui. something I didn't think about is the main server has a user account for me to log into that is not root. on the backup server, I had never made another account and was using root to login to the web ui.

watching the task I can see that it is sending snapshots to the backup server and is slowly progressing but when I open the folder in windows, specifically the one that has the music stored on it from the backup server, it is empty now. I am assuming that it is transferring data and since it transferring in blocks, the files in that folder are not readable yet. I did not check the box to overwrite any existing data in the replication task but I assume it all would show up once the task is complete.

at the moment this is what I am seeing but time will tell if it is actually working

after it completes I will test again by inserting a placeholder file in each folder on the main server, then let the replication task run normally on it's schedule. if all the placeholder files show up in the backup server I can confirm it's working again.

Still I have no idea what caused it to stop working in the first place.

 

[dbrannon79]

looking at this I am assuming it it sending the entire media folder to the backup server rather than just the files that are not present there? over 3tb of data?

 

[dbrannon79]

I'm surprised no one has posted anything here.

it ran the replication process and successfully completed, but over this weekend I added some text files in several folders in the main server. allowed it to run it's normal scheduled snapshot task and replication, it showed everything was successful but when checking the same folders in the backup, the text files I added were not there.

I am still stumped as to why this is not working.

 

[Wouterplop]

Hello, as i am also stil fighting to understand replication it looks like that it is a snaphot issue on the backup. Because thats what makes the differential from the backup. Maybe they dont arive or the naming sheme doesnt work probably on the backup.