I've almost no experience with SBS 2008, so please excuse my noob question!
SBS 2008 only has the most basic backup utility built in as far as I can tell (similar to Vista), and it will only back up to physical volumes. I've read that you can set up a batch task to backup to a network volume, but right now I just need to get something deployed ASAP.
We have an iSCSI target with plenty of free space. Is it worth backing up to an iSCSI target? Or am I wasting my time? If I need to do a recovery from the iSCSI disk, how would I go about it?
Best Answer
You should be able to run backups to the iSCSI volume, so long as you're not trying to backup a volune on the iSCSI to itself (i.e. have a separate backup volume and you'll be fine).
To restore, you'll use the Windows "Recovery Environment", just like you would from any other Windows Backup-based restore. I'm not finding docs on attaching to an iSCSI target with the Windows Recovery Environment, so I'd recommend researching that in more depth before you start relying on such a backup.
Here's a "step by step" guide from Microsoft re: Windows Backup on Server 2008: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770266(WS.10).aspx
Some articles on Windows RE: - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749147(WS.10).aspx - http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/
Not having an iSCSI storage close at hand right now, I'm not able to do any testing for you. I'd expect that getting the iSCSI initiator to connect to a target from WindowsRE won't be too difficult, but it'll probably be somewhat off the beaten path.