We went through one of the toughest recovery processes ever last year at this time.
The SBS had a catastrophic RAID array failure based on bad sectors that did not show up until a reboot for updates.
The slow corruption of the drive data found its way into the ShadowProtect backup images as well. Though, we were fortunate to have support via the StorageCraft forums on how to mount the image and run some clean-up utilities after the fact.
We had ended up managing to recover the SBS back here in the shop after we had moved the desktop clients over to their backup DC and mirrored shares. They were at least functional while we ran the recovery.
The recovery odyssey was chronicled in the following blog post:
Note that it is a rather long read as it covers the full gamut of the recovery process including all of the roadblocks presented by having a second DC on an SBS domain. There are a lot of pearls (Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade) in that post! ;)
Even with all of the hiccups on the road to recovery, the only problem our client had the Monday morning we had Swung (SBS Migration) in the new hardware based SBS was with two users who had happened to have changed their passwords during the previous week while SBS was offline.
The scene:
- SBS 2003 SP1 Premium on Intel hardware.
- Win2K3 R2 Standard as backup DC, DHCP, mirrored shares, 2NIC NAT – team unpaired for failure state.
- 18 users in an Accountant’s office (during peak season too).
- Approximately 350-400GB of data to preserve.
- Success Rate: 99.999% (two user’s password call)
Jeff Middleton’s SwingIT Kit tied into ShadowProtect’s backup and recovery abilities are the keys to this disaster recovery success.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)
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