[HOWTO] Windows Fileserver backup

[Rigido]

Hi All,
I know it could sound as an awful question but: Is there any "best practice" to backup a Windows 2003 fileserver (even with users home directories), JUNCTIONs (!!!) and LNK?!
Right now there is an "always incremental" backup scheduled and as I hope they will upgrade the server, I would like to optimize the FS backup too.
We're facing CryptoLocker problems and restoring files is a PITA...

Thanks.

 

[marclant]

With file servers, the biggest problem with an incremental backup is the inspection of the files to determine what to backup. So if you have million of files, that takes a lot of time, and if it's a 32 bit machine, then memory can be an issue as well.

Journal backup can help you speed that up. Some swear by it, some swear at it, up to you to make your own opinion.

Having multiple filesystems on different disk help too, you can back them up in parallel. In the event of a disk failure, likely don't need to restore all the filesystems.

Other than that, it's pretty much standard backup/restore.

 

[moon-buddy]

Don't do Journal backup with Windows - it is does not work well; just trust me. If this was on AIX or Linux, I can say give it a try. I had Journal backup on AIX and works well.

One way of going around this - as echoed by Marclant - is to divide your FS into smaller FS preferably on multiple disk. Size it up for about 1 TiB max and do multiple backup sessions - one for each FS. You can create multiple node names or run parallel dsmc sessions each calling a different dsm.opt file.