[noRulez43]

Originally Posted by Sembee

You would have to use an external NAS drive and that would probably mean using a third party tool.

Does the entire data partition have to be backed up? An awful lot of my clients have data drives of that size full of junk that doesn't move. That usually means doing a backup of the live data daily and the older data weekly or more.

Simon.

Well, that's where I'm a little confused. I only have about half a TB of actual data to backup (the rest of the space is just there for possible future growth) but I'm understanding that I, for some reason, need a drive at least as large as the total capacity of the drives that I'm backing up? Would I need a third party solution to get around that supposed rule?

edit: in that previous post, I meant 4 X 1TB drives....not 6 X 1TB drives. Sorry

[Sembee]

If you use a third party tool then you can be more selective about what is being backed up. You don't have to backup most of Program Files or Windows to be able to recover the server, nor do you need to backup the WSUS data or databases.

Simon.

[noRulez43]

Would a 3rd party solution also allow me to use a disk that is smaller than the total capacity of all my drives? Since I really only have about 500 GB of data, I'd like to be able to use a couple of 1-2TB drives and swap them daily so one is off-site and one is on-site.

[Sembee]

Yep - you just select what you want to backup.

Exchange, System State, a few other bits and pieces.

Simon.

[teiger]

I never offer that as a solution.
How do you recover to bare metal from that, or restore in the event of a disaster (even in the case of virtual machines)?

[noRulez43]

I'm not sure but I think I may have confused the situation. What I'm saying is that my new server has a total capacity of around 3.5TB. I have 2 x 146GB disks for the OS and then 4 x 1TB disks for all other data. That is the total capacity. Now, the amount of actual data I'll have on there, at least for now, is actually less than 1TB. After doing some reading, I got the impression that I still needed a backup drive that would cover the 3.5TB even though I only had less than 1TB of data (system state, exchange, data, everything). So, I was wondering if a 3rd party solution would allow me to use a 2TB external drive (easy to find) as I would think that would be plenty of space. I suppose there could be a very good reason they require a backup drive large enough for the total capacity though.

[Sembee]

Originally Posted by teiger

I never offer that as a solution.
How do you recover to bare metal from that, or restore in the event of a disaster (even in the case of virtual machines)?

Reinstall SBS, put the system state back and then reinstall Exchange using the recovery modes. Same as you would for any regular Exchange/DC reinstall.

Not as nice as doing a full image, but if you haven't got the space to do the entire thing then it is the only option.

My preference would be a second domain controller though.

Simon.

[teiger]

Originally Posted by noRulez43

I'm not sure but I think I may have confused the situation. What I'm saying is that my new server has a total capacity of around 3.5TB. I have 2 x 146GB disks for the OS and then 4 x 1TB disks for all other data. That is the total capacity. Now, the amount of actual data I'll have on there, at least for now, is actually less than 1TB. After doing some reading, I got the impression that I still needed a backup drive that would cover the 3.5TB even though I only had less than 1TB of data (system state, exchange, data, everything). So, I was wondering if a 3rd party solution would allow me to use a 2TB external drive (easy to find) as I would think that would be plenty of space. I suppose there could be a very good reason they require a backup drive large enough for the total capacity though.

1. 4 X 1TB disks: Is that the raw capacity or have you already mirrored them?
2. If you want to use the built-in backup solution, then you have to have disks of at least the size the OS sees. That means that if you have a C: partition of 140GB and a D: partition of 2TB, you are going to need a backup disk of at least 2.14TB. You could get round that by creating a 140GB C: partition, a 1TB D: partition and a 1TB E: partition excluded from the backup - then you would need a 1.14TB backup disk.
3. The other option is to use a third party tool which would let you do selective backup. You could then do backup based on your data size and not your disk sizes. However, as Simon has said above, in the event of a disaster, you would be forced to do a reinstall of everything in a special manner which would take more time - and effectively costg the comapny more.
Hope that clears things up a bit.

[noRulez43]

Seems like I put myself in a tough spot with the amount of storage I put in this thing then. The 4 X 1TB disks are raid 5 so, I gather that is 3TB so I'll have a little over 3.14TB to back up and I'm having trouble finding external drives that are supported by SBS 2011 that size. It also sounds like I'd be better off sticking with the built-in backup in case of failure. Should I start looking at partitioning the 3TBs in half or are there other options that I should be looking at? Thanks for your patience on this.

[ITwill]

SBS 2011 Backing Up to RDX drive – solution

Like many people before me I have run into the well documented (now) problem of SBS 2011 (and 200 not being able to back up to an RDX cartridge drive whether it be internal or USB

The workarounds I’ve seen are either using other software (backup exec for example) or for scheduling a “full backup” using Windows backup.

Of course none of these solutions allow you to see the backup results in the SBS console so you won’t get backup notifications and the server will forever be telling you that you’ve not configured / carried out a backup which is quite annoying.

I believe I’ve found a working solution to this which lets you use an RDX drive, lets you do scheduled backups which are reported back to the console and therefore register as successful backups in the notification emails you get sent by SBS.

I’ve tested this on SBS 2011 using a USB attached external RDX drive.

I don’t know if ALL of the points are absolutely necessary to get this to work but for the sake of a few clicks its probably worth doing all the stages !

1. Share your RDX drive and give “everyone” full access permission to the drive (“everyone” may be overkill but I’ve done that to ensure no permissions issues stop this from working – you may want to adjust security accordingly)
2. Go into Windows Backup (NOT SBS CONSOLE) and configure your scheduled backup – select what you want to backup and then choose the option to backup to a remote share.
3. Choose your shared RDX drive as the destination for the backup
4. Select your backup schedule and complete the backup wizard.
5. At this point in theory you have got a scheduled full server backup but of course this doesn’t “report in” to the SBS console and you wouldn’t get any backup completion notifications from the SBS console either
6. Next connect a supported USB hard drive to your server – this is a temporary step but needs doing (virtually all usb hard drives are supported)
7. Go to the SBS console and select “configure your backup”
8. Go through the SBS backup wizard, select what you want to backup and when and complete the wizard – I chose all the same settings as the ones I’d just used in the Windows Backup including the schedule time just to be on the safe side. The only difference is the backup destination – you can only select the USB hard drive not your rdx drive as these are not supported in SBS backup but that’s fine – go ahead and select the USB hard drive and complete the backup wizard. It will now show that the backup is configured and scheduled in the console
9. Close out of SBS console and go back to the Windows Backup Wizard again.
10. Disconnect the USB hard drive at this point – no longer needed
11. Select the “change backup settings” option and leave all the settings as they are except for when you get to backup location – here you want to select your “share” option and once again input the path to your rdx share
12. Complete the wizard.

Now what I discovered was that when you use the SBS console to setup a backup, the console creates a task in the windows task scheduler called something like “Windows Server Backup Schedule Task” (or similar) This is also what is created when you use the Windows Server Backup Wizard – exactly the same scheduled task name.

By doing what we’ve just done above, we’ve created the scheduled task as far as SBS console is concerned but then we’ve changed one of the settings in it (the backup destination) using Windows Server backup.

I’ve now got an SBS server happily backing up to an RDX drive each night, sending me a status report by email in the morning to say its completed and showing the backup history in the console window too. I’ve even done a restore of files and folders which worked like a dream. Now remember you are getting a FULL server backup as well as the bare metal restore so you can restore anything you could usually restore if you were backing up to a support USB hard drive

There are a couple of things to be aware of though / which I haven’t tested yet;

1. Do not click “run backup now” from within the SBS console – this makes the console crash for some reason. Probably doesn’t like my workaround. If you want to “run the backup now” you can do so from Windows Server Backup software or run the scheduled task. When running, it appear in the console as backup in progress.
2. I haven’t yet checked to see if the backup automatically overwrites or appends (if space) what is already on the cartridge. If I find it doesn’t overwrite or append then all I need to do is schedule another task to run shortly beforehand which formats / wipes contents of cartridge so not a big issue really.

So there we go – a working solution (as far as I can see) which allows you to use your RDX drive with SBS 2011 – perhaps someone could test this on SBS 2008 as well but I can’t as don’t have access to a suitable test server

Hope this helps people and would be interested in any feedback