Quote:
Ideally, I would like to put an image of the whole drive somewhere else (...) I want to be able to restore from a backup and have everything up and running again with a minimum amount of fuss.
Then an entire drive image might not be what you're looking for.
If you do an entire drive image, you have to restore the entire drive to whatever the last backup time/date was. Imagine situations where only a portion of the system needs to be restored. Such as, one of the users erased a shared folder and needs it back. Or a virus damaged only certain files. Well, you'd have to roll back the entire system to the state of that image. Even if the image were from just last night, what about all the work on all the other files the users had done that day up until that point? Plus, doing an entire system restore is a huge job for just a small bit of damage.
In my experience, you're better off with a file-by-file backup, so that you can grab individual files off of the backup media. That's a much more common need.
Quote:
I want to be able to make that image while the server is still up and running.
Most commercial backup programs allow this with a few tricks. For example, database software such as Lotus Notes or SQL server will need some kind of a plug-in installed that lets the backup software grab the data out of the databases "live". At least that's the way ArcServe handled it when I was using it.
You can also schedule the backups to happen at night, and have the scheduler run "net stop 'SQL Server'" when it starts, and "net start 'SQL Server'" when it's finished. I was able to use this approach instead of the plugin approach because our server didn't need 24/7 uptime.
Enterprise backups can be tricky to do right.
Previous Topic
Index
