Question

Looking for best bare metal backup and restore for Windows RAID 10 servers

Asked by: murryc

I have a client running a RAID 10 Windows server with Server 2003, Exchange 2003 and several server-side applciations.  This is a vital server that needs little downtime for failures.  I am looking for comments on the best bare metal (backup to network drives) solution for backing up and restoring to the RAID 10 with ease.  There are plenty of solutions for restoring to a single drive, but what are the best for restoring to the RAID with ease?

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Asked On
2009-11-04 at 08:59:22ID24871540
Topics

Backup & Restore Software

,

Disaster Recovery

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: DextertronicPosted on 2009-11-04 at 16:38:25ID: 25745754

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Server is the gold standard in enterprise level server imaging.

If your original server failed you would take the images created by BESR (one image per volume) and deploy them to new hardware using a boot CD and either a network share or an external USB drive.

BESR doesnt really care what kind of RAID the volume is using when it restores an image.

All you need to do is configure your replacement server with the same number of volumes (whatever RAID you chose) and BESR will restore the images to the right volume.

I have restored servers to complete different RAID configurations many times using BESR.

This assumes that you are using hardware RAID (i have never tried it with software RAID).

Try the trial version form Symantec - fully functional for 60 days.

 

by: veedarPosted on 2009-11-04 at 17:14:02ID: 25745913

If you prefer a free solution Clonzilla Live supports hardware RAID bare metal backup and restore.
http://clonezilla.org/

 

by: SelfGovernPosted on 2009-11-05 at 08:28:39ID: 25751112

Depending on whose servers you are using... HP's ProLiant servers in combination with most backup applications support One Button Disaster Recovery.  OBDR lets you take a full backup of your system, and then perform a bare-metal restore from that tape, by selecting an option at boot that tells the tape drive to ID itself to the system as a bootable CD-ROM -- no floppies or CDs needed; the target disk configuration doesn't matter.   Other vendors may offer similar functionality.  

This assumes that you're running HP servers and HP tape drives... but most business backup applications will support OBDR.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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