Deployment and Imaging Group

I had some strange issues yesterday with drivers/preboot configs, so I saw I had some updates available (I was already SP1), so I figured I'll just install those while I'm at it.

Everything still seems fine today (fixed the preboot issue) except one of my file copy jobs that happens post image was failing.  I finally traced it down to the file itself was missing on the server.  The folder existed, but was empty.

I can't be sure installing the 6 updates I did yesterday did this, but I checked permissions on the file itself and most are read only except myself so not sure what else would've done it.

Anyone else seen anything like this?  This is the 2nd time that volume shadow copies on that server have saved me a headache (yesterday I also used it to restore my preboot drivers to what they were the night before I messed with them).

This is where the empty file was located, as soon as I put it back from backup I was fine again.  I'd suggest anyone who can turn on Volume Shadow copies on the server does!

\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Agents\Deployment\Task Handler\CopyFile\guid folder

You might turn on delete auditing on the server, it might give you a clue (if it happens again) who or what is deleting it.  Also, you may want to search the entire server for your missing files to be sure that someone hasn't accidentally moved it to another location (I get that occasionally on my file servers).

Oh, I an completely agree on the volume shadow copies (I have my file servers set to 5 times per day) and the fact that my users can restore their own files is a huge time saver for me.  But it should be noted that it is NOT a replacement for regular backups.

DS 7.1 seems to be really touchy about drivers. I've had several scenarios now where I've done an upgrade to DS, or I've been adding a new driver to DS, and then after I'm done, the entire drivers folder is EMPTY. Oh, the whole folder structure is there, to be sure - but all driver files are gone. How on earth does this happen? What logic causes DS to delete every single file in the DriversDB while leaving the folder structure intact? It's a mystery to me. As well - my drivers.manifest.xml gets corrupted at least once a week and I need to rebuild. Yikes. Never had these problems with DS 6.9. I've learned to make duplicate backup copies of everything in the Deployment share before I make even the slightest change. It really stinks.

besides VSS, what kind of regular backups do you do on the server/db?  There's no automated backup procedure in CMS is there?

As with all of our servers, we backup to tape (with the exception of backup images from clients).  Most enterprise backup solutions have an option to be able to backup a live SQL databases (i.e. Backup Exec, NetBackup, IBM Tivoli, ArcServe, etc.).  We do nightly backups on the database and incremental/weekly backups on the rest of the server (again we exclude the backups that our techs create).

If your company or department doesn't want to spend the money on the backup licensing (or in some cases, the SQL connector addon that some backup software want), you should be able to set up within SQL a regular maintenance task that exports the database to a flat file for backup purposes.

You should be able to do this in the SQL Server Management Studio.

thanks everyone for the feedback.