So, I'm looking at a bare metal restore situation with my current setup. Not sure if this is possible, but looking at a hypothetical restore path to bounce off of with some Server Fault gurus ;).
As of right now, our DC currently hosts our Exchange 03 services along with some IIS websites. We are currently using Backup Exec 11d to do our backups. It's on a weekly rotation with a full backup performed every night. If I find that we have catastrophic OS failure (putting me in the same place as if I were doing a bare metal restore), I will not be able to get back to point of operation (at least not easily).
I'm thinking that creating an image (using Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image) of the system would give me the base needed to get back to where we were. Even if the image gets to be 6 months old, as long backups were being performed to point of failure, the image could be reloaded and a restore of the last backup could be performed only putting us a day out from the point failure. Are there any flaws to this thinking?
What got me thinking along these lines in the first place is that while doing an inventory of all our software media, it would turn out we are missing quite a few disks in order to build a box from scratch that provides the same services (no Exchange 03 disks, no BackupExec 11d disks, no Windows Server 03 VLK). I am currently addressing this issue, but in the mean time, I need a plan for recovery. Any insight is appreciated.
Best Answer
Your right that getting an image of the system would be important at this point since your missing the media needed to reinstall and restore. The problem I see with this is if there is a failure of the hardware you will not have anything to restore that image to anyway and if you replace the hardware with something that is not identical to what the image was taken from you might still have a hard time getting it to restore.
In my opinion you should be looking into having some kind of redundant windows server. Get a second server set up and make it a DC, DC's are multimaster in Windows 2000/2003. Simply promote it to a DC in the domain, and let AD replicate. Replication can also be set up with exchange and then it is just a matter of keeping a copy of the website in IIS on that server and pointing the DNS at it when the primary server fails.
Hope this is of some help for you in thinking through your strategy. And one last thing you might want to look into Bacula and Clonezilla instead of Backup Exec 11d and Acronis True Image, It will save you some money and they have much cooler names :)