Server Recovery Crisis!

[T_Lister]

Good morning all,

 

So as one does I've got myself into a state with a physical server that I need to role back the C drive volume to a previous state. However the machine has had BackupAssist used for the backup, which uses Windows Server Backup for volume recovery. I cannot fathom how I get the tape drive and Windows Server Backup to talk to each other to recover the C drives!! It is quite possible the tapes are naff, but it seems strange that three of them wouldn't work...?

 

All help welcome!

[Meldrew]

So, is the tape drive visible to the server? Does it appear in device manager properly? What happens when you try to catalogue a tape - does it just show them as empty?

 

Meldrew

[T_Lister]

This is the annoying thing. In Windows the tape is there, the VHD file is there. The problem is, whoever set this up used BackupAssist which seems to control the way you restore the volumes?

[T_Lister]

So I think I can in theory do a system state restore. However the tapes keep showing offline in Windows Server Backup... I had one visible, tried a more recent tape, couldn't get it, now can't go back to the one I could!!

[smithson83]

BackupAssist has the facility to create a bootable recovery media to enable the bare metal recovery of servers.

[T_Lister]

So if I were to create bootable media on a USB pen for example. I would then be able to do a baremetel using the tape that already has it on?

[T_Lister]

System state restore has worked through safe mode. BackupAssist seems to have been a bit of a pointless bit of software considering it doesn't even use it for the volume recovery.

[roc1479]

Yes you should always try system recovery before any other methods. If your backup assist support bare metal recovery, then use, with the boot disk you'd be able to restore the entire server providing you had the tapes.

[KK20]

I used backupassist on two occasions to restore a physical and a VM from "bare metal" (if there is sucha thing with VM!). You use the recovery media created with BA. BA might use windows imaging as the engine but it also has its own cataloging system hence its own restore media. If you get totally stuck with drivers, simply copy the recovery info from storage to a big USB drive - this is what I did with the physical server as the BA recovery media could not see the iSCSI CSV backup directory (for obvious reasons).