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Remotely Backup Small Business Server 2003 (SBS) to WHS RRS feed

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    I am looking into getting a WHS, but the most important thing I am looking to do is backup my small business server 2003 at my office remotely to the WHS.

    I read I can do remote backups using Hamachi or a regular VPN, but will I be able to do this with SBS 2003?

    If so, what would be the best way to do this?
    Every night the office server makes a 30gb backup of itself. Would I be able to backup the incremental changes every night, but ignore the new backup that was created and just make the backup itself on the WHS (if that makes any sense).
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 6:19 PM

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    Yankees9920 said:

    I am looking into getting a WHS, but the most important thing I am looking to do is backup my small business server 2003 at my office remotely to the WHS.


    I read I can do remote backups using Hamachi or a regular VPN, but will I be able to do this with SBS 2003?

    If so, what would be the best way to do this?
    Every night the office server makes a 30gb backup of itself. Would I be able to backup the incremental changes every night, but ignore the new backup that was created and just make the backup itself on the WHS (if that makes any sense).



    Although a few people have been able to install the Connector software on SBS 2003 and back it up to WHS, it's unsupported (which means try at your own risk).
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 6:23 PM
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    Yankees9920 said:

    I am looking into getting a WHS, but the most important thing I am looking to do is backup my small business server 2003 at my office remotely to the WHS.


    I read I can do remote backups using Hamachi or a regular VPN, but will I be able to do this with SBS 2003?

    If so, what would be the best way to do this?
    Every night the office server makes a 30gb backup of itself. Would I be able to backup the incremental changes every night, but ignore the new backup that was created and just make the backup itself on the WHS (if that makes any sense).



    Although a few people have been able to install the Connector software on SBS 2003 and back it up to WHS, it's unsupported (which means try at your own risk).
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 6:23 PM
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    kariya21 said:

    Although a few people have been able to install the Connector software on SBS 2003 and back it up to WHS, it's unsupported (which means try at your own risk).


    Is there a way to check if this install of the WHS Connector works before buying and building a WHS?

    With the Connector, how does it make the backups? Does it image the whole computer the first time and then only do the incremental changes? Or will I be able to select to image the whole computer except the existing Backup folder?
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 9:04 PM
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    Yankees9920 said:

    Is there a way to check if this install of the WHS Connector works before buying and building a WHS?

    You can get the 120 day eval of WHS for free, install it in a VM, and try it out yourself.  :) 

    Yankees9920 said:

    With the Connector, how does it make the backups? Does it image the whole computer the first time and then only do the incremental changes? Or will I be able to select to image the whole computer except the existing Backup folder?


    There's a little more to it than that, but basically yes.  It does a "complete" backup every time it runs, but if a file hasn't changed since the last backup, it creates a "tombstone" that points to the file that is part of the previous backup (instead of backing up the whole file again).  The advantage of that is that it creates a SIS-like setup.  In other words, if you have 3 XP PCs in your LAN (all with the same SP) and back all of them up, it will only save one copy of a specific OS file (since the file is identical on all 3 PCs).  The second and third PC backup would have a tombstone that points to the original file stored from the first backup.
    Saturday, December 27, 2008 11:09 PM
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    kariya21 said:

    There's a little more to it than that, but basically yes.  It does a "complete" backup every time it runs, but if a file hasn't changed since the last backup, it creates a "tombstone" that points to the file that is part of the previous backup (instead of backing up the whole file again).  The advantage of that is that it creates a SIS-like setup.  In other words, if you have 3 XP PCs in your LAN (all with the same SP) and back all of them up, it will only save one copy of a specific OS file (since the file is identical on all 3 PCs).  The second and third PC backup would have a tombstone that points to the original file stored from the first backup.


    Does it allow you to restore to any date that a backup was completed on (like System Restore), or can it only restore to the most recent backup?>
    Sunday, December 28, 2008 3:22 AM
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    Yankees9920 said:

    Does it allow you to restore to any date that a backup was completed on (like System Restore), or can it only restore to the most recent backup?>



    You can restore to any backup that is currently available on the server.  However, it has limits as to how many days/weeks/months of backups it keeps.  You should check the WHS documentation here for more info on how WHS works.
    Sunday, December 28, 2008 3:31 AM
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    Also be aware, if the backup database runs in trouble, it can well affect all backups. So you can not rely solely on that backup, especially for business relevant systems.
    And backup is less file based, it is storing the information of clusters, links duplicate clusters and changed clusters in it's database. So it can store data even more efficient, but make it impossible to access single files in the backup outside of the tools WHS offers for this.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Sunday, December 28, 2008 10:22 AM
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    Olaf Engelke said:

    Also be aware, if the backup database runs in trouble, it can well affect all backups. So you can not rely solely on that backup, especially for business relevant systems.
    And backup is less file based, it is storing the information of clusters, links duplicate clusters and changed clusters in it's database. So it can store data even more efficient, but make it impossible to access single files in the backup outside of the tools WHS offers for this.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf


    This will not be the only backup for the business. The SBS server runs a daily backup to itself and has a RAID array. I want this to be used for offsite backup for the business. As well as the standard home purposes. It would be great if my son could backup his computer remotely from college too.
    Sunday, December 28, 2008 3:23 PM
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    Hi,
    you should consider also, even if this works, that bandwidth may become an issue. Especially since the bandwidth for upload usually is limited, on a system with lot of changes. Alson there is no parallel backup of multiple machines, only one at a time. The initial backup should in each case be done onsite, in the same LAN for the same reason, since subsequent backups only transfer the changes.
    For backing up a Small Business Server with Exchange check also this KB article.
    And remember - this scenario is fully unsupported, so if you run in trouble if a restore attempt fails, you are on your own.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Sunday, December 28, 2008 4:59 PM
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