Back up of server

This gentleman that I do some consulting work for called last night saying him and a MSCE friend of his decided to hack the registry on a server that he uses for IIS, mail server, and nameserver. Well to say the least it crashed. And of course they did not make a backup of the registry or anything before editing it (You would think they would cover that in MSCE training, but anyhow). So to say the least got to spend a few hours last night rebuilding DNS, IIS and mail account entries for him. But now he is just thinking of disaster recovery which brings me to my question.

What is everyones best opion on how to back up this server. It is housed at an offsite buisness. I would suggest a tape drive, but since there is no one there to change tapes except for maybe once every few weeks I am not sure this is the best method. And mirroring would not protect against something like what happened last night. Any other ideas?

Since all they did was hack the registry they could not bring the box back up with last known good? I do not see a good way to back up a server if no one is there to do it,but the tape method has always worked best for me.

The only thing I could suggest other than a tape backup (which would be the ideal solution), you could schedule a full backup every Friday to a hard drive big enough to fit all the data on it. Then do Incremental backups every day on the same hard drive, then have the process repeat itself. Again, tape backup would be better because you can store tapes offsite.

Also, xsrx, Last Known Good only applies to the last successful logon. So, in theory, if the logon dialog box was displayed and they logged into the server and THEN it crashed, there would be nothing they could do.

It can be expensive to setup depending on the situation, but there's a program called ArcServe by Cheyenne that will do remote backups on a network. Unfortunately I believe the tape drive itself needs to be installed on a server...possibly a simple second server at the location itself that is only used for backups could accomplish this. Depends on how important backing up is to the customer I guess.

OK the cheapest possible solution is a tape drive, Arcserve is now made by Computer Associates not Cheyenne. You can back up other servers over a network with Arcserve by shares or using an "agent". Anyways remote backup should have decent bandwidth. You could also look into an autoloader type tape back up device, again money is a big issue.
Hell you could mirror the whole server to another location as a backup/disaster recovery scenario if you want to spend the money.

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Born to Network

thanks for getting the info straight, iamtheman, arcserve was the best i could think of at the time

Yes they do cover backing up the registry with the MCSE2K cert atleast, couldn't speak for the NT'ers. I'm guessing they didn't install recovery console either which would of saved them if they had backed up the registry, sounds like another paper MCSE making experienced MCSE's look bad. Try not to refer to him as an MCSE anymore......

I would recommend tape backup also for offsite storage capabilities. Another way might be hot swap harddrives but tape would be cheaper.

Tony

Probably go with a tape drive with one complete backup per week and incremental backups the rest of the week. And then just pick up the tape once a week. Not the best solution, but still keeps the data offsite and only a week old at most.

Although also thought of getting something like a 15 gig snap server and an extra NIC and just backing up to that system everyday. But then run into problems with it being only onsite.

you need one of these !!

http://www.exabyte.com/graphics/x200blkmed.jpg

seriously, if you need an enterprise level solution check out this tool. it'll fill in the blanks for you.

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/tbs/CompaqBackupSolutionSizerv1.0-Fcs.exe

or, a single 35/70 dlt drive might do the trick if your server is small. you can configure overwrite protection levels with backup exec and arcserve.. even though i completely hate both of those apps. scripted backups with ntbackup.exe is so much more reliable.



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