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Today I was investigating why some ntbackup jobs were failing on a remote server, and came across this error message in the logs : “End of Media encountered while backup up to non-removable media”. So I googled the error, and came up with a couple forums talking about how backups being saved to tape drives get this error when the tape runs out of space.  In my situation however, I was not using a tape drive for the backups, I was using an external hard drive.

Below is a screenshot of the NTBACKUP log

As you can see in the NTBACKUP log, when it tried to backup the files to the external hard drive it encountered the “End of Media” error.

So at this point I was hitting my head against the wall wondering why in the *(#$ is this happening!!?  The external hard drive had plenty of free space for the backups, it just didn’t make any sense!!  As a usual Sysadmin response I decided to dig dipper into the issue.  After thinking it though a bit, I had some inspiration to check “Computer Management” and take a look at the partition and filesystem setup of the external hard drive.  Below is a screenshot of what I discovered in Computer Management:

If you look volume E: in the top right, under filesystem it reads “fat32″! Once I saw that it occurred to me that the backups were failing because they exceeded the 4GB file size limit of the fat32 filesystem.  Sure enough after checking the backup sizes It was just barely over 4GB which would explain why NTBACKUP reported that the disk was out of space.  After discovering the true cause behind the failing backups, I backed-up all the data on the Western Digital MyBook, reformatted it with NTFS, and transferred all the data back onto the external drive.  That effectively solved the issue and allowed the customer to continue to backup the server without buying any additional hardware.

It just comes to show that most problems are simple to fix and easy to overlook.

References:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_20710438.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

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