The official blog of the Windows and Windows Server storage engineering teams
Hi, this is Sanjoy Chatterjee, program manager for DFS Namespaces here to talk about client failback. Several branch office failure scenarios can result in client being bound indefinitely to a remote server even after availability to their local, preferred server is restored. Customers commonly deploy DFS for availability or for data protection. They will, for example,… Read more
Deciding between System State Backup and Allcritical Backup in Windows Server 2008: Which one is the right solution for my needs?(To learn more about System State Backups and how to run these in Windows Server 2008 please check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742124.aspx) Q) First of what exactly is an Allcritical Backup? A) An Allcritical backup is a backup… Read more
When it comes to the defragmentation experience, simpler is not always better according to some very vocal Windows gurus. But is Defrag really all that simple? Turns out, there’s quite a bit going on under the covers, especially compared to Defrag in Windows XP. I sat down with one of the Defrag developers, Victoria House,… Read more
Several customers have asked us how to move the Offline Files cache location from the default location (c:windowscsc) to another volume. Here is a procedure for doing this. From an elevated command prompt, run the following command:REG ADD “HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesCSCParameters” /v MigrationParameters /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f Run the following command as a user who is… Read more
Hi! I’m Cosmos. Follow me on Twitter @cosmosdarwin. Background Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 features a built-in, persistent, read and write cache to maximize storage performance. You can read all about it at Understanding the cache in Storage Spaces Direct. In all-flash deployments, NVMe drives typically cache for SATA/SAS SSDs; in hybrid deployments,… Read more
We’ve seen a number of customers ask why their incremental backups are almost as large as their full backup. This can be surprising on a lightly used system where you don’t change or add a lot of files between backups. Seeing files backed up that you know you didn’t change can be perplexing, but there… Read more
This is the first in a series of posts discussing the new features in the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Before we dive in, it’s important to note that all existing VSS solutions for Vista and Server 2008 will work as-is on Windows 7 and Server… Read more
ContextIn Windows Server 2012 R2, iSCSI Target Server made significant improvements in its persistence layer by providing larger, resilient, dynamically-growing SCSI Logical Units (LUs) that are based on the VHDX format. For more details on what is new in this release, see my previous blog post iSCSI Target Server in Windows Server 2012 R2. In… Read more
My previous blog post explained how to configure the DFS Replication management pack. The backlog monitoring feature of the management pack is disabled by default and requires some additional configuration. This blog post explains how to enable backlog monitoring using the DFS Replication management pack and also describes how to override some of the default… Read more
We’ve seen a lot of questions about restoring Complete PC Restore images to different hardware. Here are some answers to the common questions. Q. Can you restore a Complete PC Backup image to a smaller drive if the amount of space used in the initial backup is smaller than the smaller disk? A. The backup… Read more