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By Walter Scott
Contrary to the conventional thinking, backing up a system has never been an IT manager’s primary top priority. Rather, the concern has always been: “How do I get my system and my data back up and running after a disaster strikes?”
It’s important to remember, however, that backing up systems is still considered standard operating procedure at large businesses and should be at small to midsize businesses as well. Failing to take a current snapshot image of a hard drive is tantamount to gambling that your car will never need a repair.
Disk drives, like car engines, are mechanical objects. It’s not a question of if they will fail; it’s a question of when. From the moment a server goes online, the clock starts ticking on when it will fail. Unfortunately, no one knows if that clock is set to 10 seconds or 10 years or any time in between. As a result, it is critical for the IT manager to have a copy of that drive in a known, good working condition so that when it fails, restoring the server will be a matter of minutes, not hours or days.
Downtime costs vary by industry based on the industry’s reliance on technology and typical labor costs. For a small to mid-size business, the average cost of downtime is approximately $18,000 per hour, according to Farid Neema, president of the market research firm Peripheral Concepts Inc. (PCI) of Santa Barbara, CA. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, when SMBs suffer “significant data loss,” four of five companies will be out of business within five years.
What is required is a backup that can be restored quickly and easily to different hardware, according to Neema. However, Windows doesn’t make that easy. You cannot, for example, simply copy the contents of one disk drive to another, nor can you physically move a working disk drive from one machine and place it in another. In both cases, Windows’ internal security system will identify the action as an attempted act of piracy and Windows will not boot.
So how do you create a backup that’s so transportable? Today there are basically two approaches that allow you to restore to dissimilar hardware. Both do the job but attack the problem from very different perspectives.
One approach strips out all identifying information when a backup image is created. This not only includes the Windows’ Security ID Number (SID), but also all configuration data about the network, user mailboxes and other configuration files. While you can restore that image without completely reinstalling the operating system, it is still necessary for an engineer to reconfigure the network and all user accounts from the ground up. Depending on the number of accounts and configuration files, it can easily take a day or more to reconfigure such a system.
A second approach is to take a snapshot of the entire disk — including the network configuration files, SID and all system configuration files, as well as all programs and user data — and then restore that image to the new system. Using a boot disk, the core components of Windows are loaded onto the machine. The system then reboots into Windows and continues the restoration of the disk.
As different devices are found, Windows installation will stop and ask you to install the device driver or point to a folder where device drivers are stored. The key here is having the repository of drivers that keeps Windows happy and installing. Don’t worry — this approach comes with a device driver library that Windows can find quickly and easily.
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