Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Tue Jan 12 10:13:02 CST 2010
Dear Group, My wife, Janet, wrote a while back asking for advice on server backups. She's the *de facto* system administrator where she works, a retail high-end natural food supplement store with a large Internet presence [ www.naturalhealthyconcepts.com]. I said "de facto" because she really has no experience with hardware or networking. Databases, queries, a little web design, sure. Trouble-shooting network and backup issues? Yuck! Anyway, I've been, of course, privy to her continued struggles with the backup issues she's been having. This all started when Janet's boss had a new server installed. It's a Windows Small Business Server 2008 system. That's a hybrid of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005. The company that installed the server had never installed Small Business Server 2008 before...but the co-owner of the computer company is a roommate of one of the boss's employees...so, lets give the kid a chance, eh? Well, they haven't been much help. Shortly after the server was installed, I persuaded the network administrator of the place I had just been downsized from to come in on a weekend and take a look at the server and speed it up and offer suggestions. He had recommended a backup system based on a Thermaltake BlacX eSATA and USB docking station. Janet's boss purchased a couple 500 GB Seagate drives to cycle in the docking station. For backup software, the network admin recommended Casper. He didn't specify which edition of Casper to use...so Janet's boss authorized the purchase of the personal edition since it was only $50. Janet was able to get successful backups with Casper a few times...but she was continually frustrated because NOTHING seemed to work with respect to setting up a schedule for unattended backups. Lately she became a beta tester for the Casper Tech Edition, normally about $550. As a "reward" for being a beta tester, her company got a free copy of the new version. This has also been a spotty performer. Casper sometimes took over 12 hours to make a complete backup. She also tried Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 Server. There was a 15-day trial edition. That installation exacerbated her problems. Apparently, Acronis replaces the Windows Volume Shadow Copy with its own version. When she went to un-install Acronis, the Volume Shadow Copy service was disabled somehow and now Casper has even more problems since it relies on VSS. She's been trying to re-enable the Volume Shadow Copy service so that Casper Tech Edition will work properly. One more thing: the server has a 70 GB SAS RAID 5 array and a 500 GB data drive. Janet has attempted to backup both of these drives to one of the 500 TB drives in the docking station since ALL the space on those two production drives isn't used up. Acronis would often say that there wasn't enough room on the backup drive and abort. Another little "feature" of Acronis, apparently, is that it makes a temporary image during backup and needs extra drive space...at least that's my (limited) understanding. Janet's boss has purchased a couple more 500 GB drives to use for backups and Janet is juggling those as best she can with the limited knowledge she has of the way these image backup programs work. So, here are the questions: 1. what do you think of using an external docking station to plug in backup drives? 2. what do you think of the cloning-type backup solutions that are SUPPOSED to make bootable backups of a server? 3. what do YOU use to backup your servers? 4. what positive/negative experiences have you had with Acronis/Casper/Ghost/etc.? 5. should Janet recommend buying 1 TB drives for backups instead of cramming two drives onto a 500 GB backup drive? That'll do for now! This has been 9 or 10 months of struggling and praying that the hardware doesn't fail. Regards, Steve Erbach Neenah, WI