Hi,
This might have already been covered, I had a quick check but can’t spot anything exactly the same offhand, my apologies if it has…
I’d like to duplicate the urbackup server for extra redundancy to another machine that’s connected to my LAN but in a separate building. I could perhaps use all manner of tools for this job but it’d be nice if urbackup can be used. For example, can the client be installed on the server and have it connect to yet another server for example?
The source and destination server would be both server 2012 r2.
Maybe it s a not so good idea, but maybe try to backup as windows image, then restore using urbackup cd ?
Maybe you d need to reset some windows/application ids/activation keys
Redundancy would imply trying to have it run, to fail-over onto, I’m not sure if that could be made to work.
Windows won’t like introducing a duplicate machine (clone) onto the same network, particularly but not limited to AD environments. You’d need to run sysprep on the clone before introducing it if server 1 is still present (not failed).
If you’re planning on backing up server 1 to server 2, just to restore in case of hardware / other failure, that could perhaps work. If I were attempting it I’d only trust image backups, and snapshot all volumes (including server1’s backup storage) together. Otherwise ensuring UrBackup is in a consistent state regarding what’s actually stored and what its database thinks is stored might be awkward. Even then, given the amount of disk activity trying to back up the first server live, and how fast/slow the link is to server 2, I wouldn’t be surprised at having to tweak arcane VSS settings to avoid running short on space for shadow-copies making the imaging fail, or disable inbound backups while the outbound one runs. Plus you may need to wait for .VHDX support to appear, since the backup storage is apt to be too big for plain .VHD
Just to clarify, all I’m after is making a copy of a fileserver I backup with urbackup is all.
By redundancy I mean a copy of the backups (docs like word,excel etc), not the OS etc.
I was just curious if I could use urbackup client on a server to copy the files off the server onto another server in a separate building, gives me extra backup in case of a fire for example.
As far as I’m aware I cannot simply install urbackup server and have the original client back up to that too, it only backs up to a single urbackup server. Given that situation I’d expect trying to put a client on the server would mess things up - eg it would most likely detect itself as the server.
There are of course many ways of doing this, rsync for windows, robocopy perhaps or just plain old windows backup, it would just be convenient if urbackup had a method for doubling up on backups.
Thanks for the replies so far, hope that clears things up a bit
Another simple option if you’re using Windows Server is to setup DFS replication between two servers. If you have UrBackup set to automatically backup the DB then that would also get replicated. I know it’s not then part of UrBackup, but it’s easy and reliable.
