SBS 2008 backup owns the entire disk, or just one partition?

[i300i]

I have a new SBS 2008 and a new external 1TB RAID 1 array. Being unaware of any changes in SBS 2008 vs. 2003 backup processes, I planned to use this 1TB drive for SBS backups, as well as other general storage on a home business network.

I see now that SBS 2008 backup takes possesion of the entire volume, with a format required before backup, and the drive cannot be used for anything else.

For someone with SBS 2008 backup and restore experience, I have a couple of questions:

1. Will SBS 2008 backup work with only a given partition on the disk, while I use the another partition for general file access? (I wasn't expecting this $400+ redundant disk solution to be only used for a 25GB SBS backup. My fault for not reading all of the SBS 2008 documentation.)

2. I read that SBS 2008 backup is now an incremental process, as opposed to the full backup with retention policy. This should require far less space on the backup volume, as my SBS 2003 had 7 days of full backups at any given time. The question is: Can we still retrieve a single file from the SBS 2008 backup set, like we could with NTBackup sets in SBS 2003?

Thanks is advance.

 

[NetworkTek]

I haven't tried partitioning a portion of the drive. But as i recall i don't remember this being an option. You could give it a shot and see what happens but i believe it will want to format the entire drive.

Now on the backup question you can edit the backups to do a full every night I dont' recall exactly where it's at. I believe it is in the sbs console under backups somewhere. Otherwise to restore a single file you will have to restore it from the last full backup and then restore it from the incrementals to catch the changes.

Hope this helps

Network+
Inet+
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MCSA 2003
MCTS

 

[i300i]

I just completed a test to verify the answer to the first question. The short answer is: you're right.

I connected an e-sata drive to the server and created and formatted two partitions. I started SBS 2008 backup configuration and it only allowed me to select the entire drive. Upon confirmation, it removed both partitions and created a single partition. I ran the first SBS 2008 backup, which was a full.

As to the second question, I prefer an incremental backup so I don't have to use storage up to 7x the data to be backed-up. I was able to restore single files from the backup, although the process leaves something to be desired. It's pretty much focused at selecting an entire folder, or individual files from a given folder. There is no tree with selection boxes ala NTBackup restore.

Overall, I find the SBS 2008 backup/restore process to be sufficient for my DR needs. I just can't figure out the use case for requiring the entire disk.

 

[ShackDaddy]

The SBS2008 server will take control of the entire disk.

It will take a base image and then will create incrementals over time as long as there is still space on the disk. So having a large disk allows you to have very deep backup histories. And you can restore any file you want from any point-in-time since the initial seed image, so it's actually very simple to do a single-file restore to a point-in-time.

Typically people use a couple of smaller Passport drives or something that runs around $125 or so for this purpose. It's good to have two so that you can rotate one offsite. The first time a backup runs on ANY new disk, it's a full image. From then on, when the backup starts, it looks at what it has for a history FOR THAT DISK and then does another incremental from the last backup ON THAT DISK. So if you bring a disk back into rotation that you hadn't used for six months, the next backup run on that disk will include six month's worth of changes. So that night's backup may be quite long compared to the previous or the following evening's.

Hope that helps clarify some things.

Dave Shackelford MVP
ThirdTier.net