System backup / disaster recovery for Small Business

feenster99

feenster99

feenster99

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Joined
19 Jun 2003
Posts
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Location
West Yorks, UK
Hi all,
I've been looking at setting up a backup / disaster recovery system for a small network. The equipment is this:
- Windows SBS 2003
- Veritas Backup Exec 10
- LTO-2 tape drive (200/400GB)

With the above, is it possible to setup a backup routine that would allow a bare metal restore onto different hardware if the worst were to happen? I know my way around the basics of Veritas, and know SBS 2003 fairly well, but have never really looked into this aspect of it.

Any help/tutorials/links you could provide would be greatly appreciated,
Matt
 
Hi,
Thanks for the reply. Answers to your questions as follows:

what hardware are you currently using?
I don't know precisely off the top of my head, but it's likely to be a Supermicro motherboard, Xeon Dual Core, 2GB RAM, Adaptec 2810SA RAID card with system and applications on 2 x 160GB RAID-1, and Exchange/Data on 3 x 160GB RAID-5

what version of sbs are you using? (i.e. standard, or premium)
Standard, R2

how many users do you currently have on your sbs network?
Around 30, but there are 30 others setup as Contacts in Active Directory to forward email to another site

whats the projected growth rate of users over the next 12 months?
Not much more than 2/3 users per year maximum

what's the average and largest size of exchange mailbox?
Average is around 300MB, largest around 2GB

if you are using the premium edition, are you using sql for a line-of-business application?
There is another application installed that uses SQL Server 2005 Express

are you using sharepoint?
No, thankfully ;-)

how much user data is there stored on the server, in terms of gigs?
Around 100GB of data, and about 15GB Exchange max.



I'd toyed with just making sure that Veritas was backing up the data, and use Exmerge to spit out the mailboxes to PST files every night, which could then be backed up on tape and copied onto a NAS drive on the network. This would leave out any custom group policies, user account settings etc etc which would be handy to preserve.

Does that help at all?

Matt
 
Hi,
Thanks for the replies. I think i'm going to go down the VM route - convert the physical to virtual and make sure it is regularly updated.

What conversion softwares are there? I know of VMWare Converter - the vConverter looks interesting, but the website is apauling. Do any of the convertors allow the conversion of a physical Linux Server?

Matt
 
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