Backups

[CommodoreS]

We use a program called Backup Assist for our backups and have just moved from a Windows 2003 Server to a shiny new Windows 2008 Server, which of course does not support NTBackup.

 

When the software is asking us how we want to backup it is giving us the options of Windows Imaging as a System Backup or File Replication, RSync and Zip as a File Backup.

 

Ideally we want to be able to restore individual user files encase they are deleted, and the entire server in the event of a hardware failure.

 

Can anyone recommend what method to use for this?

[bjeffery]

We do an image based backup of our windows 2008 file shares and enable previous version at 7am every day which gives 75 snapshots - if you do this you should never need to do a file based backup. However if you backup the image file to tape you have it if needed.

[djm968]

Are you re-deploying your old 2003 server? What I have suggested to my clients who have undertaken a similar upgrade is to re-deploy the existing server to a remote secure location somewhere onsite, to provide a Disk to Disk to Tape backup solution.

 

This would work as follows. User data on the 2008 server is backed up or copied across the network to the 2003 box. This can be done over night, every night and offers immediate recovery of data.

 

The user data on the 2003 server can then be backed up using your existing backup software and backup policy.

Edited July 30, 2010 by djm968
typo

[KK20]

I still use NTBackup - the old one copied from an XP machine. I added the location to %PATH% (the freshly copied NTBackup location) and all is good. The scheduled backups work fine. There is one caveat! VSS doesnt work so locked files wont be backed up. Allegedly there is a workaround using exchange files - I will be sorting this out at christmas when I migrate our exchange to ex2010/svr2008. I have a clonezilla image for bare metal restore (system drive) and the data is backed up via NTBackup now.

 

The new windows backup was thoroughly useless since it didnt support network shares and im not using our "data" iSCSI drive link for backups (backups are on a different NAS not capable of iSCSI).

[CommodoreS]

Thanks for the info, but still confused as to what method to use in BackupAssist to allow full system restores in the event of failure (most important), and the occasional user file (less important). Will ZIP backup be good enough to do a full Win 2008 restore with all the AD and configuration?

 

BackupAssist - ZIP64 file and data backup, tape drive support, Windows Server 2008, VSS aware, compression, AES-256 encryption, multi-threading, Exchange and SQL support

 

The new server has a 500GB RDX drive.

 

The Windows 2003 server is being completely decommissioned as it is so old, so there is no option to use this.