Part of my requirements are test restores of critical boxes in a lab environment.  The lab is isolated and when I restore a client, there’s not really much we can test because the client looks for the production network.  Today I had to restore a Windows 2003 Server in the production environment and most of the registry wasn’t restored; services and other objects were missing.  With the test restores, I always had the option of doing an ntbackup of the System State and then I would run a full backup of the client.  I’d take my tape to the lab, run a full restore, but before I rebooted the restored client, I restored the ntbackup of the System State (Shadow Copy Component.)  That seemed to work just fine.  But today when the server blew up, there was no opportunity to do an ntbackup of the SS first.  I asked Symantec last year if the ntbackup was still needed and they said no, a full backup and restore should recover the client.  I just never had the chance to test that theory.

Am I missing a step?  I installed the OS from a basic CD install, loaded the NBU client, and then did a full restore.  But it’s as if the system state was never restored so I’m wondering if I’m even backing it up.  How can I tell?  Do I need VSS or VSP activated in order to get a good copy of the system state?  We turned VSP off over a year ago because we were having problems with the orphaned cache files.  I’ve never gone back and changed the setting on most of the clients and my plans were to start using VSS but haven’t gotten to that task either.  Is there a trick or an added step to getting a good backup of the system state on a Windows 2003 Server server or is there a trick to restoring it?

Thanks,

Randy