Brick Level File Replication for two servers

Curiosityx

Curiosityx

Curiosityx

Soldato
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
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Location
West Midlands
Greetings, im looking at a cost effective,(Free!) way to store off site disk backups of company data.

Preferably i would like to take an initial snapshot of our data and put it on a secondary sever offsite connected to the HQ via a L2L IPSEC VPN, following this i would then like to replicate any changed data from the HQ to the secondary server during the night.

Ive used DFS, Doubletake and Symantec many years ago but dont get involved in Windows projects anymore as such im alittle rusty.

Were running Windows 2003 SBS Sp2 at the HQ and Window 2003 Standard Sp2 at the secondary site, the VPN has already been established and the secondary server is also a domain controller.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Regards
 
You wont want to do an initial replication over a WAN. Take a local copy onto some HDD's, take them to the 2nd site - then something like rsync over the WAN to copy the changed files since the copy was taken.

Free block level replication is a PITA.
 
Although I'm unsure about SBS2003. Windows Server 2003 with R2 has a much better DFS replication engine (which does do block level sync'ing, remote differential compression).

We use it at work and it sounds like it would do what you need nicely, if SBS2003 supports this.
 
SMN said:
You wont want to do an initial replication over a WAN. Take a local copy onto some HDD's, take them to the 2nd site - then something like rsync over the WAN to copy the changed files since the copy was taken.

Free block level replication is a PITA.
Click to expand...

Indeed yes i will be taking an initial copy, thank you for the replies, yes i think i was hoping for miracles looks like ill have another look into DFS.

Regards
 
mr.bond said:
Although I'm unsure about SBS2003. Windows Server 2003 with R2 has a much better DFS replication engine (which does do block level sync'ing, remote differential compression).

We use it at work and it sounds like it would do what you need nicely, if SBS2003 supports this.
Click to expand...

Sadly the DFS in SBS2003 (even in R2 form) is the vanilla DFS rather than the DFS-R included with Server 2003 R2 and Server 2008. I looked at something similar in a previous job and this was the outcome :(
 
JonnyT said:
Sadly the DFS in SBS2003 (even in R2 form) is the vanilla DFS rather than the DFS-R included with Server 2003 R2 and Server 2008. I looked at something similar in a previous job and this was the outcome :(
Click to expand...

Yes i just spent a good couple of hours today realising just that! Bugger!
 
FYI - Most replication software (from what ive seen) uses a protocol called NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol), however i havent seen an open source software implementation in my 5 minutes of googling. Hope you search goes well fella.
 
Yep Curiosityx, it's a pain.

Obviously this goes against the solution being free but I'd get a couple of win 2008 r2 servers running server core just to handle the DFS shares. As others have alluded to, DFSR is a quite a lot better in 2k8 r2 than the replication (ntfrs) available with SBS 2k3.
 
but... has anyone tried using this block level/rdc algorithm to transport the delta updates of server images? It would work, surely?
 
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