Now, when I say "backing up" I’m not talking about backing up normal data etc ....... i.e., if you suffer corruption of the OS and can no longer boot to the OS, you want to get it back up and running ASAP, what do you all use to take a snapshot/image etc of your server??

Last week we had a nightmare three days trying to recover/repair a server where some muppet hardware engineer had been out to replace a failed hard drive in a RAID 1 mirror and somehow managed to **** up the rebuild part trashing the only single disk left in the server. This was a small business server and caused major corruption to AD, Exchange etc. We couldn't do a full fresh rebuild (would have been quicker) because we needed the exchange database files as we wouldn't have been able to pull these into a newly built domain.......

Anyway, because of this I am now looking into a better method of backing up a whole system, OS, data etc etc so should a failure like the above occur again we can say **** it lets restore from a full system image and be up and running again in a few hours!

I have found a product from Symantec "Backup Exec System Recovery" which seems as if it will do the job, so I will download a trial and test it.

Anyone else got any suggestions/recommendations??

Cheers

P.S. I forgot to mention we have tried the ASR option within the normal windows backup util but would prefer to use something that could, for example, take regular snapshots of the system and possibly not require floppy disks!

 

Acronis

 

Symantec here too mainly

 

Symantec

 

Legato

 

Veritas or Symantec

 

Veritas Backup Exec is what we use on our SBS Server, saved my @ss a few times i can tell you!

 

For you I'd sy veritas. We use commvault.

 

What media are people using ?

Due to the small size, we backup to a NAS (in RAID) and then onto an external Hard disk (we have several) which are taken off site.

 

We use Tapes we back up around 90 to 150GB daily these are taken off site by a 3'rd party company (Iron Mountain)

 

Thanks for the replies, from looking at the Symantec product am I right in saying I would be able to restore from an image file sitting on external hard disks (USB/NAS)?

When booting to the recovery CD it seems to have options for network settings so assume I would be able to do the above?

Does anyone have issues with loading RAID/SCSI controller drivers etc?

 

Just starting to use LTO4's now

 

Using the hardware encryption?
What throughput you seeing?

I've just ordered another 50TB of storage today so I would imagine the Tape library might be complaining that there just isnt enough hours in the day shortly!

 

How on earth did he manage to do that??

He only had to plug the disk in and it would rebuild itself

 

unless its a mirror done within windoze

 

To be honest David, we have currently only quoted and supplied them, havent actually been out and installed one yet so cant really say

However I will check on the next one we supply & install

Are they much different to LTO3 speed wise ?

 

Very good question that!! It's hard to say as we wasn't on site at the time but from what we can gather/from what our customer noticed, when the server first booted it went into the BIOS of the RAID card automatically.

The "truth" then gets a little vague here from the engineer but by all accounts the drive started rebuilding itself (when we have dealt with the same servers we normally have to tell it to start the rebuild) and was going to take a few hours, because this was doing it in the BIOS of the card the server was obviously still down at this point and the customer then mentioned to engineer that they didn't want to be down for that long so he stopped the rebuild and booted it back to windows (still running on the second remaining good disk from we can tell).

Once in Windows he then kicked off the rebuild again, this was going to take some time obviously so engineer then left.

Hour or so later we get call from customer saying they can't access server etc and from the description our customer gave it was in a scan disk type screen flashing up loads of files.

Turns out only good disk they had/were running on ended up getting corrupted big time. When we eventually got windows repaired we found all their data was corrupt too, i.e. opening a word document would just display pages full of little square boxes

So we are not 100% sure what actually caused it, if it was to do with him stopping the rebuild from the RAID BIOS or maybe even their second disk failed too, who knows, but it's now running with two new disks in it.

Apparently when the engineer walked in one of the first things he said was “oh, it’s been 5 odd years since I have done anything with a server”!!!! I mean FFS!

He was from Fujitsu Siemens (same make server) and needless to say we are currently speaking with Fujitsu passing on our “comments”!!

 

Im with Fuji all day tomorrow, I might just mention it to them

I do have to say it isnt the 1st time I have seen RAID destroyed (hardware not software) by incompetent engineers/IT staff

One of them cost us 5 days in our time because he unplugged a different disk whislt the replaced one was rebuilding and the backups weren't all that good either

 

Not a replacement for Tape but it would have done what you wanted in this instance, I normally use them in remote offices and then stream the data offsite but they will also do 'Bare Tin' restores of servers and they keep snapshot versions. Have a look...

http://www.sonicwall.com/uk/backup_and_recovery.html

 

Hp Quote the MSL 6000 libary at 10.5TB per Hr.

but thats with 16 active drives


For us they will be quicker hopefully as we have to do software encryption.. hopefully with LTO4 we can do SAN attached Library and NDMP with wire speed encryption.

We did look at the Decru boxes but they aint cheap!