RE: HA Server Backup Tool/Process recommendations needed (XP Pro only)

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David.

There's more than one question in there, and therefore, more than one
answer!

Mirroring the disk would protect you against "catastrophic
failure" but
not against "accidental deletion", you would have to adopt
different
strategies for these two scenarios.

I would personally be very happy to use simple RAID 1 mirroring (and
indeed I do) of a system disk. I think this is better than just having a
hot/warm/cold standby disk, as if one of the mirrored disks dies, the
server carries on with no interruption. Most (all?) standby strategies
involve at least a small interruption to service as the standby disk is
bought online... (and this may require manual intervention). Mirroring
can be done at both the hardware level and in software (IIRC XP PRO
supports software RAID 0 & 1 using dynamic disks, but if I also
remember
correctly, dynamic disks can't be imaged with Ghost et al.. so you have
an either / or choice)...

Regular backups are easy to arrange, either file based, or image based.
Image based obviously has the advantage of being able to do a "bare
metal" restore to a blank disk fairly quickly. - However, if you had a
mirrored disk, the likelihood that you'd need to do this is diminished.

Have you considered virtualisation at all? - either VMWARE or MS Virtual
PC can run on top of XP quite happily. Running a single guest VM on top
of the host machine rarely (IME) makes much of a dent in the performance
of the host machine, provided it's not a completely ancient spec
(anything based on P4 or newer seems OK, - so anything made in the last
5 years basically). The biggest impact is to the memory, so usually
adding another stick of RAM to the machine is enough to keep it all
running happily. VMs can be very rapidly brought back online on another
machine in the event of almost any kind of failure. (You do have to
protect the virtual hard disk file of course) - This may not be an
option though if you have specific hardware requirements for the HA
server, although most serial and USB devices can be mapped through into
the VM.


Food for thought, anyway.

Paul G.



>
> I have scheduled data backups and I have a fall-back light switch
> scheme, but rebuilding onto a new hard disk still took several hours.
> I am considering a hot or cold standby machine, or even cold standby
> hard drive, but also have to balance risk/cost.
>
> So what would you do for backing up an HA server against catastrophic
> failure as well as accidental deletions?
>
> Server runs XP Pro (no choice on that ... it's not going to Vista and
> I can't get/afford WS2003)
> Slightly inconvenient to attach external drive directly so could
> consider this on an occasional basis.
>
> How good/bad is BIOS/hardware SATA RAID on most motherboards from the
> point of view mirroring and surviving a single hard disk failure ?
>
> What is easiest/cheapest/quickest disaster recovery tool to get a
> machine rebuilt quickly ? Especially interested if they can have
> scheduled backups to a NAS to avoid having to clamber about with the
> external drive.
>
>
> Cheers
>
> David
>