Brick Level File Replication for two servers

[Curiosityx]

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

 

[Curiosityx]

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.

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

 

[Curiosityx]

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

Yes i just spent a good couple of hours today realising just that! Bugger!