Little Server Guy -
Info from a Guy Trying to Run a Little WS2003 Server on the Cheap
Backup - Tools and Approach
My philosopy about backup is this: a computer is a complete entity that merges OS,
services, applications and data with hardware. The only way to protect this kind
of integrated system is to preserve the whole thing. Good backup means an image backup of the drive or drives
needed to run the system. To be of any use, it has to be possible to lay that image
down on another drive, possibly in another machine, quickly and reliably.
I've already groused about the "you get what you pay for," approach to justify spending
a lot of money. With respect to backup, I could hardly imagine what I might be getting
for spending hundreds of dollars on a backup program - well, I can imagine, but
it's not a polite word.
I'll write another time about my decision to use inexpensive hardware and keep a complete
hot spare system. Suffice it to say, for purposes of my backup, I have one machine
running as my server, and a very similar machine right next to it as a backup. My
backup machine is there in case of hardware failure, but as long as it's there,
it can also function as a backup repository.
Imaging the Backup Machine from a second internal drive
Like I said, I'm a little guy, and cheap. I have a license to run windows server
2003, but that license was clear that I could not install the OS on a hot spare.
And being a writer of both software and books, and an inventor, I respect that license
restriction. So my hot spare machine is running XP. Now lets assume I have an image
backup of the primary machine on the backup system. It's not installed, it's just
a backup, which is ok. If the primary machine goes down, how do I bring up the backup
from that image? I could copy the image off to say, a USB disk, then lay that image
on the backup system's drive. For my business, down time means lost revenue to I
want this to happen fast. If I need another disk, I can also make it a second internal
disk. that's what I chose to do. I bought a modestly priced ATA drive and added
it to the system. That second drive is the repository of the image backups from
the server. Running a decent backup program, I should be able to lay that image
onto the backup machine's primary drive farily quickly, boot it up and it will think
it is the primary server.
The Key: A decent image backup program
I was about ready to give up on this, but I didn't. Eventually I came across
Image for Windows, aka IFW by terabyte unlimited: http://terabyteunlimited.com
web site.
With a few exceptions, it does what I hoping for. Even better, it costs under $30.
It not only makes an image backup without having to read a horrendous manual,
but it makes a bootable CD which, with only a little thought, a computer can easily
be booted from that CD and an image from any storage device on the machine can be
laid down on any disk partition. It does not matter what is presently on that partition,
and it is a simple one-step restore.
What does it lack? It doesn't do scheduling, and it doesn't manage the number of
backups retained. Scheduling is not a big deal. There are only a few parameters
needed to create a dos commandline that can be made a scheduled task. I hate to
admit it but I dug up some dos code that creates an environment variable based on
the date and uses that to create a subdirectory and a backup name based on the date.
Scheduling this nightly, I get a new image created over the network from IFW running
on the primary server and writing the image on the second internal drive in the
backup machine running XP. Since I'm a little guy, my server OS plus my web sites
and databases are only about 7 GB. IFW compresses this to about 4 GB in the image
backup. Thus I can easily keep over a month's worth of daily image backups. Why
so many? Because I do dumb things, don't realize it, and back up my mistakes.
As for managing the backup collection: still working on this, but I will probably
do a little more dos coding and put the image made on the first of the month into
a separate directory. I found a little shareware dos command that deletes files
older than a date or a number of days. I'll prob schedule that daily on the backup
machine, deleting daily backups older than 30 days and monthly backups older than
a year. That should keep me within the space on the second disk.
Comments? Combine the word "richard" with the words "server guy" with no spaces
or punctuation and stick it in front of the domain this page is hosted on. That
should get an electonic message to me.
(c) 2006 Richard Skerritt