I am evaluating a trial version of Symantec System Recovery.
What I would like to do is make a complete image of my server so that I can quickly restore in the event of a disaster.
I have a Dell server with an operating system partition (RAID 1 - 2 physical drives) and a data partition (RAID 5 - 3 physical drives).
On the OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) partition there is a hidden Dell Utility drive, a system recovery drive and the OS system drive.
What I would like to do is create an image that captures everything . . . except the data on the data drive. I back this up separately.
I have a job that images the hidden Dell drive, the system recovery drive and the OS system drive. My question is, if I had to restore from this image, will it also restore a blank data drive. I am assuming that the OS has the information for the data drive and therefore would show that drive on a restore.
If this is true, I would do a System Recovery restore to get my server running and configured like it was before, then I would simply copy the data back to my data drive.
Does this work? If not is there a way to do what I want to accomplish?
Thanks in advance for anyone that can help.
PS - The reason that I do not simply want to image the data drive as well is that it is huge. I intend to do frequent OS images to an external drive. If I also imaged the data drive, it will fill the external drive too quickly.
