How do you backup your 2003 servers???

T

Teecee

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May 31, 2005
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I have a question for you IT guys out there that manage several servers. Do you guys backup the entire server or just the important stuff on the server like SQL or something? The reason I ask is, lets say there is a crash and you need to do the restore. Wouldn't it be just as fast or faster to reinstall the OS from scratch? Most of my servers are pretty standard installs minus a static ip and a few minor changes that I have documented. So I am thinking that there is no need to backup the same windows files and program files all over my servers over and over again. Now I do have the space to do the backup but what is the point? Just grab the things that I cannot replicate, like DBs, maybe a few config files, and thats it.
 
Acronis Enterprise can create incremental images, it's fairly easy to setup and even easier to restore
There can be a lot of things that aren't backed up when only doing files, such as permissions and shares, which can get really confusing if you have tons and tons of folders
 
AMD T-type said:
Acronis Enterprise can create incremental images, it's fairly easy to setup and even easier to restore
There can be a lot of things that aren't backed up when only doing files, such as permissions and shares, which can get really confusing if you have tons and tons of folders
Click to expand...

+1 for acronis, thats what we use and its pretty awesome
 
It depends on the server. What if it's also your domain controller?
I take it you're talking about member servers or stand alone servers in workgroup mode...in those cases, the built in NTBackup works great for me. Even on DCs it's still fine.
 
On the DB machines we do a full backups of the SQL databases nightly on a separate internal drive. Then we Acronis the machine nightly to an external drive. We do a full backup, then set it for differential rather than incremental. That way we can delete some of the outdated backups , and a restore doesn't require that ALL of the backups are good as long as the initial full backup is still there. It takes a little more space on a daily basis, but works better overall for us.
 
I use a custom solution (kinda, lol) that allows me to backup logical drives every 15 minutes. The incrementials collapse into synthetics which can be turned into a virtual server in around 30 minutes in the event a server dies.

And it acrives data and is very solid.
 
So those of you using Acronis, do you do this on big servers or smaller ones? Do you have to down the box to do the backup? Do you backup every single file or only a select few?
 
We use R1Soft's CDP for both Windows and Linux servers. And, we backup all files.
 
Teecee said:
So those of you using Acronis, do you do this on big servers or smaller ones? Do you have to down the box to do the backup? Do you backup every single file or only a select few?
Click to expand...

We use it on everything, from the SQL box, to the DC, to the Webserver, and all of the workstations. We always keep a full backup of everything. You can restore the entire drive, select files, or even mount the backed up image as a drive. And the Echo series lets you convert an image to a virtual machine image, be it Virtual PC, VMWare, or Parallels. I have tested the Virtual PC conversion, and it worked fine.
 
Another vote for Acronis. Actually just backed up a server last night with it. We back up EVERYTHING. Acronis is nice because you can pick and choose individual partitions, disks, or multiple disks. We choose all the disks and let it run.

My backup last night was the OS, Databases, and some data, about 207gb of stuff total. A full first time backup took about 14hrs, and compressed into 160gb. From here I can do incremental backups much faster. And the restore is quicker.

Oh, and we do backups while the system is up and running. We usually try to do it overnight though, or at off peak usage times. It will definitely put a performance hit on the system.
 
We're migrating all our Windows servers to VMWare ESX which is running off a 4Gb SAN. We then use Veritas Netbackup to backup the VMs and dedup them onto an MSA shelf. Also, the SAN is replicated live to a duplicate SAN at a DR site along with the MSA.
 
Netapp snapvault on FAS, we also run a production environment where there are a lot of dynamic manual and automatic changes, so we do a cron job to rsync engine and core files over to a few failovers
 
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