Backup Solutions for Small Businesses

I think it's probably fair to say that the days of tape are in the past. At least when it comes to the majority of small businesses. I think the only client of ours that still "requires" the use of tape is an advertising agency that frequently has to pull very old files off of tape. And even that is somewhat debatable.

Most of our day-to-day file protection is done using shadow copy now. To me, that is probably one of the best features that was introduced with Server 2003. Most of our clients are using SBS 2003, which includes a front-end for using NTBackup complete with reporting and easy scheduling. However, one huge thing that is missing from this is the ability to recognize portable hard drives as valid backup destinations. It will recognize tape drives, and any drive that shows itself as removable, like the Dell RD1000 drive (which is just a 2.5" SATA drive in a housing that acts like a tape cartridge).

That is why I was glad to hear about the changes to backup in the new SBS 2008. It is specifically geared towards using portable hard drives to protect your data (however it no longer supports tapes). The drives are setup using a configuration wizard which labels the drive and "commandeers" them for use exclusively by the backup system. The system accesses the drives using low-level API and optimizes them for speed, and therefore they are not accessible by drive letter or visible to Windows Explorer.

The system is smart enough to know the difference between multiple drives and performs an ongoing differential backup and keeps the disks so that any of them can be used for full disaster recovery. This greatly simplifies the issues we have had in the past with sites that required cumulative incremental backups due to the size of their backups.

Until all of our clients are on SBS 2008, our current backup script is pretty handy. We had cobbled pieces of it together from various other samples over the years, and I finally put it together into a single script a couple of months ago. You simply define what you want to backup and save the selection set as a BKS file in the usual spot. The script requires one of three parameters. You launch it with either /full, /incremental or /emailtest. The first two should be self-explanatory. The third tests the scripts ability to figure out which of the log files from NTBackup is the most recent, converts it to ASCII (side note: even though NTBackup log files can be opened with Notepad, they are actually binary files) and then sends it to the specified email server and recipient.

Our script calls sendemail.exe by Brandon Zehm to use as the email engine. If you are interested in seeing it for yourself, I will put it up in a separate post, or you can download it here.