Backup problem

[adamus]

Hi,

I wonder whether anyone has experienced the same problems doing backups of their historical data.

I attached a Western Digitial 'passport' harddrive with 1Tb free space to my WinXP machine via USB.

First up I tried using Windows Explorer to copy the whole NinjaTrader 7 directory from the local harddrive onto the USB drive but that failed with a simple 'unable to create file' error after copying about 1.5Gbs.

Second I opened up a command line prompt and executed the copy command from there. It copied everything but gave me a huge number of error messages on various files, e.g.:

cannot create regular file `./NinjaTrader 7/db/tick/$AUDUSD_DTC/200312122200.Last.ntd': Operation not permitted

So this method copied more than Windows Explorer let me copy, but still thousands of files were not backed up.

Lastly I tried the NinjaTrader 7 backup facility. It ran for five hours but gave me a "not enough space" error, but which is obviously way off base considering the USB drive has 498Gb free space and the local harddrive with NT7 only has a 100Gb capacity in total. This was in the trace file:

2011-04-13 00:34:47:625 Data.BackupForm.OnOK: ERROR: System.IO.IOException: There is not enough space on the disk.

at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.FileStream.WriteCore(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count)
at System.IO.FileStream.FlushWrite(Boolean calledFromFinalizer)
at System.IO.FileStream.Dispose(Boolean disposing)
at System.IO.Stream.Close()
at ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.Compression.Streams.De flaterOutputStream.Close()
at System.IO.Stream.Dispose()
at NinjaTrader.Data.BackupForm.DoBackup()

Just a few other points - I am not running NT7 at the same time (except on the NT Backup run of course) during which time I wasn't connected to any feeds at all. I'm logged in with administrator privileges. I have no anti-virus software running (I'm behind a firewall on the LAN and don't run email on this machine).

I'll try backing up to the same drive now, perhaps it's the USB drive - obviously I'd appreciate any pointers to help me get this going.

Thanks

[NinjaTrader_Kyle]

Hello adamus,

Thank you for your post.

A colleague mentioned to me that he had encountered this before when the backup drive's format and block size didn't match with the drive NT was installed on.

File system type and block size can be obtained via opening the “command prompt” and typing “chkdsk c:”


Then to format the drive, open “Computer” Right click on the external hard drive and select “Format”.
Select the same settings that the C: drive showed and press “Start”

[adamus]

Hi Kyle,

thanks for the hot tip - but unfortunately it looks like it's something else that's the problem here.

I tried following your advice and I tried to reformat the WD USB drive but despite pretending to run without error messages, the drive didn't actually format. I'll have to check up on the WD Passport drive and find out what on earth is going on. I think it runs an autoexec prog every time I connect it, but I'm not sure. I'll post back when I sort it out, for the record.

[adamus]

I managed to reformat the drive following the WD instructions and it sorted out the problem. I managed a backup without any error messages.

Thanks for the help.