Not sure what to do now VM and Back up

[MattDLEA]

So over Summer we transferred our Curriculum server to a new physical server running server 2012R2 and Hyper V so now our curriculum is a VM ( its also the DC ) I am fine and happy with that.

Currently I am backing it up with Veeam Back up and Replicate 8 FREE edition which as I now understand it just backs up the VM I can't granularly restore anything... its back up the entire VM and Restore the entire VM??

So if the VM becomes corrupt I take it this would be a good back up... but not if teachers want to get lost files ect else I would have to revert everything to the day before?

 

I have a copy of accronis 11 somewhere from the old server.

 

Also I have another physical server with 2012R2 installed ... this one is to be used for admin to host Sims and the office files. So just a file share and a Sims share. Currently the office staff just log on to the their pc's locally and are not part of the domain. I would like to keep this the same with the new set up.

Would you create a VM on this server to do all that so I could use Veeam free to back up or would you just leave it as a physical server? Then what would be your back up plan. Sims we would have backed up offsite with oakford and the files are not that large.

 

Cheers

[3s-gtech]

Using Windows Server Backup on 2012 R2, I can granularly restore anything from a VM using the Copy to folder option. That can be a little long winded, so I also have separate Shadow Copy storage attached to the VMs so that I have a decent set of VSS data for things like file servers. For individually restoring things, I can just use the wonders of VSS.

 

As a final backup, I have robocopy making a backup at the end of every day to another NAS. Means that I have three avenues for recovery.

[Davit2005]

I use Veeam v8 at home and not only can I restore AD objects but also Files on ESXi, not tested with Hyper-V yet.

 

EDIT: Just tried a backup using Veeam v8 with Hyper-V and could restore individual files.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Davit2005

[edutech4schools]

I use built in server 2012r2 windows backup in the vm (not host) to backup data to a couple of USB drives and one gets left in the safe. I also use Windows backup in the host (not the vm) which does a complete vm image backup and we also do offsite backup using clouberry as it is cheap and offsite space is now free.

 

The backup in Windows 2012r2 is much much better than it was

[sparkeh]

Any scope for getting the full version of VEEAM? Well worth the money imo.

[Davit2005]

It is possible in Veeam 8 Free edition to use powershell to run VeeamZip and set up routines via Task Scheduler.

 

We use the full version of Veeam here, not cheap for Enterprise versions. But when you are backing up 100+ VM's from 20 hosts it is a solid backup platform and we have had minimum issues with it.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Davit2005

[PotNoodleTech]

The educationally discounted version of veeam backup and recovery 8 is under £500 for a two socket host. It'll be the best under £500 you've ever spent on a piece of software.

[jmak]

Slight hijack....

 

Would it bring everything crashing down if I used 2 different backup solutions on one host?

 

My "proper" backup is hosted off site by county and that's my file restore and DR solution. However, I don't have the option to take a clone so that I could potentially play with a version of our server away from the network. I was thinking about running Altaro free version as well, which has that feature.

[edutech4schools]

Would it bring everything crashing down if I used 2 different backup solutions on one host?

 

No, At one of my schools we have LA offsite hosted backup and I also run Cloudberry backup and windows backup.

[win]

DPM 2012r2 works well. You can link it to azure and backup your stuff into the cloud