Backup of W2K3 Server - What is required?

[Mark_Magasich]

What is required to prepare for disaster recovery of W2K3 Server. Do I need a full backup of the OS drive along with the Shadow Copy components? what else??

For example I have a W2K3 server which has the OS installed on the C drive and the swap file on the D drive.
Do I need to have a current backup of the C drive to recover the server or is the Shadow Copy Components enough.
Do I need to backup the swap files?Message was edited by:
Mark Magasich

[Ken_Putnam]

Grab your Admin Guide. If you can't find it, download a copy from http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/269777.htm

There is a whole section on Disaster Recovery Preparation and Disaster Recovery.


The Admin Guide is your friend. Get to know it well.

[Mike_Pruett]

Having done this recently using BE 9.1, I might be able to shed some light!!

Your recovery options really depend on what you are going to recover to. Meaning, are you going to restore back to an identical piece of hardware, with the exact same configuration? If not, then you need to plan to have 2 different servers to perform recovery.

Identical servers are easy. If you backup the system state and any important log files daily, and backup the entire system once a week... you should be prepaired for tombstone recovery. (In a DR situation... you just restore from the last full-backup, and then apply the incremental system states to restore to the current state.)

Dis-similar hardware is pretty difficult, but not undoable. In order to restore the AD and all the FSMO roles of a DC, you need to restore the entire system (Everything!) to a "recovery" server. You might have driver issues, and lots of problems in the Event Viewer but thats ok. Then you build a brand-new DC on a new server, and dcpromo it. Then transfer all the services and FSMO roles over to the new server. (This is the one that I have tested thoughly... it works but it can take upto 48 hours to do.)

Here is a link on MS's website talking about restoring to dissimilar hardware: (It says Win2k, but it will work with Win2k3!)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263532

Hope this helps!!

Mike Pruett

[Amruta_Purandar]

Hello,

We hope the above solutions have helped. Additionally you can refer the following technote.

Title:
Disaster Recovery shortcut list
http://support.veritas.com/docs/261700

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