IDR on remote system...

[PTANK_2]

Background:

System 1
Media Server:
Windows Server 2003
BEWS 9.1 rev. 4691
IDR and AOFO
5-day Full daily backup of local and remote systems.

System 2
Exchange Server 2003
Windows Server 2003
BEWS Exchange Agent and Client Access

System 3
SQL Server 2000
Windows Server 2003
BEWS SQL Agent and Client Access

Questions:
The goal here is to have IDR for all three systems. Obviously the Exchange and SQL machines are backedup with both Client Agents and Exchange/SQL Agents.
I have no issue creating an IDR image for the media server. However, I cannot find good documentation on how to setup IDR for the remaining two systems. The docs I have seen are ether for earlier versions of BE or do not look the same as the options I get when running the IDR wizard.
Is there any clear documentation or can anyone explain how this is done, I have IDR license for all three systems and just want to get this done the right way.
Please post any further information required I am watching thread closely.

TIA,
Ptank

[Tommy_Vercetti]

I would be interested in this also. I am currently working with IDR and trying to include it in the disaster recovery plan.

From my experiments with Windows 2003 and SQL 2000, here is what I found. When you make a full backup of the server, you can either backup the SQL database through the System State, or just the SQL databases by themselves.

If you backup the SQL databases by themselves, IDR will not restore the SQL databases. The documentation says that only the defauly databases will be restored, and all user created databases will have to be restore manually. Perhaps my backup was corrupted, but the master database was not restored which won't let the SQL server start. During IDR, I tried tor restore the databases manually, but since there is no SQL server running, the databases could not be restored.

Now if the SQL databases were backed from within the System State, then during IDR, the databases will be restored. So when the system comes up, it will have SQL running with the last full backup (or whenever the IDR CD was created). Then you will have to restore additional data manually.

So my guess is to backup the SQL databases with the System State, so that when you are running IDR, the databases will be loaded, and atleast SQL will be operational.