SBS/Imaging/Disaster Recovery???

[ccarrigan]

My dilema:

How to properly backup small businesses?

With quite a few clients using SBS, we've run in to the dilema of restoring from scratch. They typically only have one server with everythign on it, including Exchange, and a complete rebuild to how it was prior takes up to 2 days (between installing the OS, restoring AD, restoring Exchange, restoring files, installing programs, etc...).

We have been looking at imaging solutions such as Symantec LiveState. However, we then need a place to store the images (external NAS?) and a much larger tape backup drive.

These sites don't have multiple servers, and these single ones are their livelyhood.

Any thoughts on quick disaster recovery? We try to have them all set up very similar so that there is no confusion on how things are done. Thanks for any help, I hope to hear what everyone does and maybe discuss some solutions.

 

[rcolbert]

A backup application such as NetBackup or BackupExec should be able to handle a bare metal restore just fine. SBS 2003 + NetBackup 5.1 MP2 would be my first choice. No need to take anything offline to image.

 

[oldpablo]

Do you have a particular problem with the disaster recovery solution built in? Its worked perfect for me with two different businesses. You backup using the built-in backup solution (customized ntbackup) daily or whenever. Then when you need to restore you reinstall SBS2003 but stop at the wizard to complete the process (install exchange, etc). You then run a restore and it puts you back to exactly where you were after the last successfull backup. Exchange and all. Here's the whitepaper detailing it. Go ahead and get another solution if you want, but the native one has been just fine for me. Unlike the standard Windows server oprating systems, you don't have to reinstall, reconfigure and restore data, its all done at the same time and exactly the way you had it.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/d/8/bd8e1a40-d202-429a-8eb7-26300d62bcc9/BKU_BkupRstr.doc