Trying to sort out backup issues. Our agency recently installed six new Dell PowerEdge T110 II servers running Windows Server 2012 Standard. Each is at a different physical location, but sites are connected via VPN to our network. We also purchased several Western Digital 3TB My Book Essentials external hard drives with one connected to each server via usb (these are usb 3.0 capable, but the servers don't have 3.0 ports). We have set up Windows Server Backup to do a daily backup to these drives which initially works on all of them. We have the data being backed up on our network using another solution as well.
The backup jobs are identical on each machine [Bare metal recovery, System State, System Reserved, Local Disk (C:), and Data (E:)]. Also included is the advanced VSS Full Backup option. I started remotely connecting to these machines from the main office each morning after backups ran to be certain that they backups completed (which they did initially). All was OK, then one randomly failed & continued to fail because the drive was unavailable. Windows Event Viewer shows"Windows Backup cannot find any of the backup storage locations" and the drive does not show in Disk Management.
I then drive across town to the location and have to disconnect power & usb to the drive, wait a little bit, then reconnect and it will come up and be recognized again and work for a few days. This has happened to all of them but not at the same time.
I've remoted to each server and made sure the USB hubs in device manager have the box unchecked that allows the OS to turn off the device to save power as I thought that might be the problem. That didn't help.
My next step is to go to the locations and try to run firmware updates on the drives, but I haven't found any documentation as to whether this is really a fix for what is happening. WD tells me those drives might work, but that Windows Server 2012 is not supported. We are a non-profit and cannot afford to replace all of these drives so I hope I can get them working and that the backups are restorable.
Has anybody seen this issue and know what the fix is? This is driving me nuts. Please help. Thank you.