We were asked to recover a folder set for a client from the beginning of this year.
When we went to the backup destination media that should have that backup set on it we were greeted with the following shock:
In this particular circumstance the SBS in question was deployed just about a year ago. The backup destination happened to be the first disk in their three drive rotation (we rotate every two weeks and test their backups for this client).
We were fortunate that the folders needed were found on Disk 2 in the rotation. But, anything beyond that would have been useless to us as the files that were changed beyond the Drive 2 date set were still needed.
What does this mean for us?
Well, for starters any client with less than three drives in their rotations will be bumped up to at least 3.
We will be implementing a grandfather clause into the backup structure to allow for one drive to have file and folder access for the last year.
In this particular case we pulled Drive 2 out of the rotation immediately so as to use as an archive just in case.
We will be digging into this server’s logs around the time of the backup drive being blanked to see if there are any indicator log entries that we can use to flag and e-mail us. There may be cases where we would want to pull that drive right out and leave it alone for 6 to 12 months.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
Can top that, had helped someone do an upgrade, and had setup an external backup drive for the SBS 2008 (in a virtual machine). Some months later, they had been running backups of data only from a workstation, and also had unplugged the usb drive in question. Then pushed the backup now button in SBS Console, SBS didn't hesitate for a second, it promptly wiped the DATA vhd file, and attempted to run a backup to it.
ReplyDelete