Windows Server Recovery

[rsiddiqi]

Hi, I am looking for a best practice to setup backup jobs for Windows server. I am running two backup jobs currently, Daily and Weekends.

The daily job backup “System State” and “Shadow Copy Components only

The Weekend job backup “System State”, “Shadow Copy Components" and contents of C:\drive excluding C:\Temp, C:\Windows\Temp\ and C:\Users

With the above backup work in case server is crashed and if I got blue screen of death. I never did recovery however this is what I plan to do.

Build the windows server from CD, restore it from Weekend backup job and override the “System State”, “Shadow Copy Components" using daily job.

Thank you.

[Markus_Koestler]

I think this is much too complicated: I assume you run a file and folder backup on weekend and a volume backup daily, right ? My suggestion for desaster recovery is to run only volume based backups daily AND weekly including the systemstate and shadow copy components. With this setting you'll be able to restore the whole server from the backup to any point in time without reinstalling the OS first. This would also allow you to use the restore anywhere feature to restore the whole system to different hardware or to todo P2V !

[rsiddiqi]

Hi Markus, what is volume backup? I am looking to backup both virtual and physical servers. I would really prefer to restore the server without re-installing the OS however I will need to understand how it will work. From your message it is possible to restore the whole server without re-installing.

Thank you

[Markus_Koestler]

Well volume based backup takes a block level copy of a physical disk or via the VSS provider of Hyper-V a copy of the virtual machines vhd file.

[Markus_Koestler]

Hi, would you please mark this post as solved in case all your questions are answered ?

[TRaj]

Also what version of BESR/SSR are you using?

[rsiddiqi]

I am using backup exec 2010 R3.