DazV

At present we backup users docs, accounts data and our sales & invoicing database to 1) a spare machine 2) DVD each day.

What worries me is, in the event of the server's harddisk going down or the machine getting toasted, we'd have to buy in new hardware and pay 3rd parties to come in and reinstall the accounts and bespoke database apps.

Is there any package which can take a mirror image of windows2k server (20GB), stick it on some kind of backup device (I'm thinking firewire removable hard disk)

Then in the event of a disaster, we can buy in the hardware and do a restore of this mirror image of Win2k Server onto the new machine's hard disk ?

I ask as I've been told the likes of Norton Ghost requires identical hardware for the image to be restored to. I doubt I could find "identical" hardware for our 3 year old server.

-DV

[Edited by DazV - 8/1/2003 7:12:15 PM]

DazV

midget, I mention my fears about Norton Ghost - is it true you need identical hardware to restore to ? In the case of a "meltdown" the old hardware would be gone - we'd have to buy new hardware.

My question would be will the ghost images work on new and different hardware ? eg. Would the Win2k server image be successfully restoreable on new hardware ?

[Edited by DazV - 8/1/2003 8:05:53 PM]

midget1500

i bought a couple of iomega 40Gig portable HDD's...only a few hundred for the 2.

they are about the size of your wallet, fast (USB x2) and come with norton ghost.

ozzy

Ghost will work on systems that don't have identical hardware, but obviously the OS may not load properly.

For example, if you Ghost an XP workstation, then restore to another that has a different video card and network card, then the display won't work on first boot and you'll have no network connection - coz the OS is expecting to use drivers for different hardware. Luckily XP would probably detect the new hardware and configure itself. Reboot and voila it's working.

I've ghost loads of slightly differing Dell PC's here @ work and only problems have been the video and NIC drivers.

How the OS loads and how easy you can fix it depends on the OS. NT4 would be a PITA, as would W2K (to a lesser extent) and XP/2003 would be good (unless you had unrecognised hardware e.g. a specific type of RAID card.

Server OS's are no different, but rely more on hardware drivers as they usually have RAID array's, RAID controllers and multiple NIC's.

Ghost is good for recovering workstations, but could be cumbersome for servers. Some of the downsides would be:-

1. Server needs to be offline to take Ghost image.
2. Ghost image will be pretty large for a server - how are you gonna store a 40Gb image for example?
3. How often can you afford the time to actually perform the imaging
4. If your server has a large RAID array (or even multiple arrays), how will Ghost cope with these?
5. How quickly can your recover with a combination of a ghost image and daily backups?

As I say, I use Ghost very successfully on all our workstations (150+) and even a few small servers (Firewall, Proxy Cache) where there is very little data stored and the only changes are to some log or configuration files.

Our firewall is Linux-based and the Ghost image is around 650Mb, so easily fits onto a CD. It takes minutes to restore and Linux will adjust if it finds new hardware. I can then restore the config files, editing them to take account of the new hardware and bingo it's back online within 30mins.

It's great for these situations, but I'm not convinced it would work on a file server, but that really depends on your environment. I would try it first as there's no risk to your existing server whilst it's taking the image - it's only copying data afterall. Trouble is, you'll need to have a network connection or another spare disk to copy the image too.

My personal choice would be a Disaster Recovery option for your backup software. We happen to use Veritas Backup Exec with the Intelligent Disaster Recovery option.

Have a look at this pdf for an idea of what it does.

Stefan

DazV

cheers Stefan

Foot_Tapper

Do you guys mind if I put an effort in.... too late

Daz, I dont know if its down to budget, but you have an awful lot of comapny data on one server. (I dont know what its performance is like, with this setup) Databases usually memory hungry mothers.
You are using one server to do 2 jobs.
A file server and an application server.
By choice I would split users data onto something else, maybe you dont have that choice.
Ozzy's idea sound ok to me.
I would just like to add : Depending on the size of the "system"
Why not create a boot cd, with the system on.. to run ghost or
powerquest...p/quest is quicker.
If you had to replace hardware, it would be quicker to get the server up, then copy data back by software such as veritas.
cheers

towzer

We tried to do a quick server install using ghost but the array controller messes everything up. Ghost takes a snapshot of the block on a particular disk, however the RAID controller gets in the way and can give false location information. When you try to lay the image back down the array controller doesn't know where to put the data.

Personally I would create a boot CD with a shell environment to allow you to access the original data that has been backed up to another media.

Phil

DazV

foot tapper - its just not worth it for a second server. The database app hardly makes any impact at all. The rest is simple file sharing on a fairly small scale. The server handles it no problem.

Is there any way to simply backup all the DNS, ROUTER, DHCP settings in Win2k ?