Our IT support company have us running two backup methods, one on-line and the other to local USB drives.
The USB options are actioned by the in-built Windows Server Backup utility.
The reason for the post is to determine how reliable a backup method this is for our Exchange box and DC and whether the backup is configured correctly.
The servers concerned are:
Physical box 1 with Windows 2008 R2 Standard and Exchange 2010 .
The parameters reported for backup of this device are.. Bare Metal Recovery, System State, System Reserve, Exchange D:, Local disk C:. Advanced Option: VSS Copy Backup
Physical box 2 with Windows 2008 R2 Standard running Hyper-V and hosting a single virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard server acting as DC and F/P server.
The parameters reported for backup of this device are.. Bare Metal Recovery, System State, System C:, System D:. Advanced Option: VSS Full Backup
The questions are... Do the parameters appear correct to allow restore of the physical box 1 and Exchange?
Do the parameters appear correct to allow restore of the physical box 2 and the hosted virtual server?
I have read articles which express concerns over "snapshot" backups of virtual servers. Does the Windows server backup software constitute the "snapshot" type backup method? If so, and this is considered unsuitable, what alternatives should I consider (bearing in mind this is our backup backup IYSWIM)?
Thanks
Phil
