While at PASS I had a chance to ask questions about Windows Server 2008. You see I tried to back up my server using the built-in Windows Server Backup (WSB) program. Ah, it's pretty crude. Interestingly enough, very (very) few of the Microsoft folks at the booths knew of the (gross) limitations of the backup implementation. The third-party companies that sell backup solutions were also clueless.
The problem is, WSB is designed to build an "image" backup. That is, it forces you to select the entire boot drive and any drive that contains important servers like Exchange. On my system this means I have to select both drives C and D. While these are not very big, WSB takes over the target backup drive, drops the partitions and rebuilds the drive in a custom format. Fortunately, I chose an empty 750GB drive as a target but it wasted a great deal of space. Unfortunately, if I wanted to also backup some of the other content on another drive there was only one option--all or nothing. Since the next drive was another 750GB, there was no way it would all fit on the target drive.
Over this weekend I discovered my backups were not working. My strategy of putting the backups on a removable USB drive so I could swap it out easily and move it off site did not work. Sure, the backup worked the first time but after that WSB could not find the drive. I had to crack open the box and add the drive to the SATA buss but this was a near disaster. It seems that Windows Server 2008 in its infinite wisdom decided to place the drive high in the drive tree so it pushed my existing E: drive down below the DVD drive and place a page file thereon. This meant my Exchange server would not boot. I could not move the drive letter as it had a page file. I had to remove the page file, rename the drives and get everything back where it belongs. I still need a strategy that lets me physically remove the backup drive and replace it with a clone to help get the data offsite.
While we're at it, I would also like the status dialogs in the WSB to be fixed. It seems that despite the fact I have plenty of screen space, it insists on cramming the information into narrow grid columns that don't show nearly all of the important data. Case in point:
I also asked for the ability to email the SA when bad stuff (or any stuff) happened. This way I won't go for days (to weeks) without knowing that the backup failed. It's also comforting to know things are working right when I'm in the field.
I heard from the PMs there that they were not done with WSB and they planned to have its functionality back up to the features of the old Windows Backup by 2010 if things go right. I guess I'll need to find another way to backup my secondary data files until then. Thank the heavens for SyncToy 2.0...
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