IDR .. many questions

[Marc_Pelletier]

Hello,

I have just upgraded to BE small business server and am now trying to figure out the IDR options. The documentation seems to jump all over the place.

I run a full backup on Saturdays with incremental the rest of the week. I cycle four sets of media, so that I have the last 3 weeks in a safe and the current week in the loader at all times. I am backing up 2 windows 2k3 servers, SBS and web edition. Backup exec is running on the SBS server.

Now I want to add a weekly backup of 5 xp pro boxes and have idr enabled for all 7 of these machines. I installed the remote agent on the 5 machines locally, as I wasn't able to push them from the server.

1. Will I have to update the bootable media for each system every week? Can I use a single bootable tape for the whole kaboodle? And can I do that automatically? The physical configurations are quite stable, but we do tend to add/remove a fair bit of software on the xp boxes.
2. Do I have to back up EVERYTHING on the xp boxes to make it work? Some users have lots of multimedia files that I don't want to back up. Can I leave out one partition?
3. The servers don't have cd writers, can I use a cd burner on one of the networked machines?
4. The disaster recovery protection wizard seems to imply that only computers running the same os can be protected. The documentation seems to say I can protect all of my systems.
5. Is there anything else I will have to install on the remote machines?

I'm sure I'll have more questions later :)

Thank you

Marc Pelletier
Goldak Airborne Surveys

[Ken_Putnam]

There is a thread iin the v9.1 forum where the consensus seems to be the IDR is a waste of money and does not work, even in controlled tests.

I've never even been temped to try it out. The difference in total down time for me to build out a vanilla install and then do a DR recovery from my last backup and IDR is so small that it's not worth it to me, and I hate being at the mercy of wizards when I don't HAVE to be

Another gotcha is that the hardware needs to be indentical (or nearly so) Differing controllers/Disk partitioning/NICs/etc will cause IDR to blue screen after boot.

[Marc_Pelletier]

Jeepers, I hope that's no longer the case in 10. Can you provide the link, a quick search didn't seem to bring up anything useful.

What do you mean by a DR recovery, just doing a restore from the last backup after reinstalling the os? I can see that working fine for the data, but not the software

The reason I am interested in this is that for the xp boxes in particular, doing the oem restore and then the jillion updates, and then reinstalling all of the applications can easily waste a couple of days, and then it still doesn't seem to be quite right.

The point about hardware is valid. The main scenario tends to be a drive failure, though, so surely that would work?

thanks
Marc

[Ken_Putnam]

Not sure what link you were refering to. the thread in the 9.1 forum is here http://forums.veritas.com/discussions/thread.jspa?threadID=45476&tstart=0

If you are only doing DLO backups of Desktop OS machines, you may have a point, but surely the better way would be to periodically make a "Gold" ghost image of your workstation machines, and in a recovery situation, lay that down, apply any updates required (shouldn't be many) and then do a DLO restore

I haven't played much with v10, but used to be you could install RAWS on a Desktop OS without having to purchase a serial. 'Course for several hundred desktops, that could be a lot of backup media, but for selected "critical" machines, may be worth looking at if v10 still lets you do this

As for the comment about worrying most about a disk failure. Surely your production servers are running RAID?

[Renuka_-]

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