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Sugested cost effective backup method

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by sostermann

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With the purchase of the previously discussed 2003 SBS upgrade I also need to put together a data recover mechanism.

The server will be an Active Directoy domain controller only. It will have two SATA drives in a Raid 1 (Mirrored) array.

I am considering adding an Iomgea Rev drive to perfrom the backups on. Does anyone have any suggestions as to if this device will be adequate or not? Also, will the Backup software built into 2003 SBS be okay to perform the backups or should we invest in Third Party Software?

I know these are a lot of questions and everyone has been very helpful in helping me understand this complicated upgrade path ahead of us. Thank you.

7 replies

by bfilmfan

Active Directory restores using NTBackup can take a great deal of time depending on whether you are performing an authoritative or non-authoritative restore, the number of user objects, the number of security groups and whether those security groups are nested.

If nested security groups are used, you will need to perform a restore for each level of nesting using the default tools, which can lead to a very extensive recovery time.

I recommend that my clients use Quest Software's Recovery Manager for Active Directory, as this can restore users and groups in one pass.

http://wm.quest.com/products/recoverymanagerad/

Just as a note, I wouldn't place the AD database (NTDS.DIT) and the OS on the same set of mirrored drives. Best to break them up amongst 2 sets of RAID 1 drives.

by cg it

nope no Iomega drives for backup. No, nada, never, nah ah.

NT backup will work with supported hardware but there have been issues back in the days of SBS 2003 Release Candidate 2 with Certance tape drives. It appears to work but in reality, nothing got backed up. Most use Backup Exec for Small Business and Quantum's DAT 72 tape backup. [costly as DAT 72 drives are like $1,000.00 USD plus tapes].

Ah as far as the 2 SATA drives in RAID 1 with Small Business Server 2003, Standard Edition might consider a better machine with a motherboard SATA controller that supports RAID 5, [striped with partiy] [they are available]. Opt for some big but not humungus drives and setup with one partition of 25 G for system, one partition for log files at 5 GB and the rest for applications. You can specify Exchange to run on the large space and with SP2 it increases the storage from 16 GB up to 76 GB.

by cg it

the reason nope nada on Iomega junk is backing up takes a god awful long time. Even using a serial port backups to external devices take time

by bobsta

I suggest two USB external hard drives, which you can rotate daily. Use the NTBackup built into 2003. If your Backup is over 50 gigs, I would definatley suggest a SCSI Tape Drive using Backup Exec.

by daveyh

I'm trying the 2-drive method but SBS complains after we swap the drives as it's apparently trying to do periodic updates to the backup file on the previous HD. Is there a solution for this??

Thanks

by tech

I actually use the rev at a few sites that have sbs 2000 / 2003. While BE has been available (v8 & 10)I have found it to be troublesome so now I run a script utilising robocopy 10 to copy the last days files, a freeware zip app to compress them, then a date stamp renaming script to distingush each days backup.

I tend to use them in conjunction with a lan based 2nd backup.

While others may poo poo the rev drive, the reason companies have sbs is to save money. I think my solution is very cost effective AND I have rebuilt a failed SCSI raid controller based failure with it so I know it works.

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