Bare metal recovery with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (Windows
2008)
Other bare metal recovery pages you might like to reference
Unlike my other Bare Metal experiences,
this is the fastest, shortest and best experience I could have ever hoped
for. Here I am using Backup Exec System Recovery (Previously called Live
State recovery) and Volume Shadow Copy onto USB attached backup drives. I
have tried other products like Shadow Protect but always had issues with the
AD and Network settings. I settled on BESR for all my SBS 2008 clients
and it works very well.
BESR's disk imaging essentially clones a
hard disk by copying it's data sector by sector, allowing you to restore an
entire system to an empty hard disk.
BESR uses a simple wizard-driven interface that you can use to create disk
images (Symantec calls these "recovery points", though they're not to be
confused with "restore points" used by the Windows System Restore feature).
You can save a BESR recovery point to almost any medium you want, as long as
it's not tape (Use Backup Exec for Tape). Options include external hard
drives, network storage like NAS and SAN or writeable optical media like a
DVD-R. I use USB external Seagate freeagent Go drives. Small and fast. Easy
to carry. (If you use multiple drives, one for each day, you do have to
change the drive's disk signature but I will have more on that another
time).
You can create your recovery points manually or set up an automatic backup
schedule instead. BESR supports two kinds of recovery points — base and
incremental; you use the latter type to store changes to a system that have
occurred since the time you made the base recovery point, and you can create
them as often as once per hour. BESR can tie the creation of incremental
recovery points to specific system events (like when an application is
installed) and also periodically consolidate them to simplify restores. I
use base recovery points daily (Say at 2 am) and then hourly incremental's
during the working hours). The Job Wizard lets you choose the type of
recovery point you want to create — base or base with incremental.
If you need to recover from a relatively minor mishap, such as deleted or
overwritten data, a recover wizard lets you browse the contents of a
recovery point to selectively recover individual files or folders. You can
also mount an entire recovery point as a drive letter on your system.
The process was to boot up with one of the CD disks from
the BESR disk set, plug in the last backup, restore, reboot and start using
the server. It was that simple.
Ok, here are more details. I wrote the
above line to highlight how simple it really was. Here's a bigger
explanation.
The product's bootable CD includes
Microsoft's Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment), and it can auto-detect
most storage , e.g. RAID, and network hardware. When you boot a system with
the CD, it automatically starts a special mode of BESR from which you can
locate and select recovery points for restoration. Since the CD
installs a host of appropriate device drivers, you can easily access restore
points stored on external devices (like a USB hard drive) or network
servers.
You accept the Symantec agreement, select the drives to
recover (Single or multiple drives), choose the destination drive, select
the drive to be marked active, read the summary and select to reboot after
it is finished.
When it is finished the computer will
reboot into the state of the last good recovery point. During boot, Windows
plug-and-play will run detecting non-critical device and peripheral drivers.
When plug-and-play has completed check the device manager and install any
additional drivers necessary to complete the process.
My restore went very well and everything
worked. Even Exchange and SQL. It went really well and very fast as my
restore went back onto the same hardware.
Normally when restoring a disk image it's best to do it on either the same,
or an identically configured, system otherwise Windows will need to identify
and load drivers for new hardware. This process is at best time-consuming
and at worst can lead to blue screens or other errors that prevent a
successful restore.
BESR offers a new feature called
Restore Anywhere that lets you recover a system to a completely
different machine. This means you can use BESR not only to restore failed
systems, but to migrate your servers to newer hardware as well. You can even
restore recovery points directly to virtual machines you create in VMware
products like VMware Server or Workstation.
The only pitfall to watch out for is
Windows Activation. If you move to new hardware, you may need to reactivate
Windows.
Final comment:
It restored, it ran, no failures, I moved on.
( )
