Norton Ghost or....?

Hi

I'm looking at software that will enable me to take a complete image of my
SBS as part of our disaster recovery procedure. The idea being that in the
event of a total falure I can reinstall the image and get things back up and
running with little downtime.

What are your experiences with this type of thing, is norton ghost the best
for the job, and what other advice / tips can you share on this?

Thanks in advance

Jason

I use Tom Ehlert's Drive Snapshot imaging software
(http://www.drivesnapshot.de), which works a treat. At a fraction of
the price of Ghost, TrueImage, et al, I use it as the primary means of
backup for a number of SBS servers. I have also used it to
emergency-restore servers both in the lab and in practice, always
without problem. If you ever have cause to perform an emergency restore
from an external HDD, then compared to restoring from tapes it is a
no-brainer.

Now, I know this approach is anathema to some dinosaur admins, but
drive imaging has come a long way over the last few years and at the
risk of being controversial ( a lot of admins could really benefit
from looking at the whole backup process afresh.

One issue that needs to be considered when using drive imaging as your
primary means of backup is that of Exchange transaction logs. To enable
up-to-the-minute recovery of an Exchange message store, you need to
keep circular logging off. In that case, transaction log files will
continue to accumulate and free disk space will eventually become
exhausted.

To get around this, I also run short system state + Exchange
information store backup (using NTBackup) just before the drive image
backup (controlling the whole process through appropriate scripts).
Running a 'full' NTBackup backup before a full drive imagining, and a
'diff' NTBackup before a diff drive imaging only adds a few minutes to
the backup process. The full NTBackup backup will cause
no-longer-needed transaction logs to be deleted and the disk space
recovered.

If SBS is the only DC in your network, then emergency recovery is
simply a matter of booting up using a PE recovery CD (take a look at
UBCD for Windows, http://www.ubcd4win.com, for instance) and restoring
the image. You can then boot straight into it and you're good-to-go. If
you have other DCs in your network, you will need to force a
non-authoritative restore. To do this, restore the disk image and then
perform a system state restore (using the attendant NTBackup system
state backup you created) before booting up fully.

--
Regards,
Steve.