How do you backup the server itself?

Server
1

The server itself is Windows 2008 R2, how do I image that itself?

2

What size would the total backup be? Not to be a total asshat, but if you are asking such a basic question, I wonder about whether you should be using something like UrBackup to begin with.

3

You can install the client on the server without any issues.

6

@eddybearjm do you mean how do you backup the BACKUP server? If that is your concern it will make no sense to install a client and backup the server in directory as the clients. What you should do is get another PC/Server with enough space, install the UrBackup server and then install the client on your main backup server. In my case I bought an external USB Raid box “not sure if I can mention the name, lol” and setup an alternate server on my local PC to backup the Backup server.

7

for availability, it would be good to have an “autoreplicate” function included between 2 servers.
but for backup this can be ok

8

Yeah, it would be great to be able to auto-replicate, but that is hard to do cross-platform. On Linux, it is very easy to implement. On Windows, there is no native way to provide the functionality. Someone would have to write an open-source library that could handle syncing all of the hard links on NTFS. There are utilities that can do it, and they are free (as in price), but I was unable to find anything that could be included on a project without running afoul of licensing, etc.

What you could do though is implement it through a user script with one of the utilities that provides the functionality and then have it run on a scheduled task. That is what I am planning to do.

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/ln/ln.html

I believe this could do what you need it to do, but I have not tested it as of yet.

9

My experience of trying to backup the backup server to another PC was a qualified failure. I set up a second PC with URBackup server, then installed the client on my original URVBackup server PC (latest versions 1.4.7).

The client can see the new server, the client tries to backup the server data, but the hard links seem to trip up the backup process. Maybe I’m doing something wrong here. I set the client to backup the “clients” directory on the volume the server uses.It goes through the motions of backing up the data, and files that are not hard linked ARE backed up to the new server. Directories that ARE hard linked are backed up up as empty, unless I specify each hard linked directory as a directory to be backed up.

Is there a way around this? Or does the backup client not handle hardlinked directories properly?