I have setup a NAS at several clients running URBackup, doing file & Image backup.
I want offsite backups of the Images (VHD) that are created by URBackup.
If I have a copy of the VHD’s for a computer plus the MBR can I boot the Restore CD and use these files to restore a workstation from the command line (not connected to a URBackup Server)? Based on reading the forum the only supported method of restoring is from the restores CD (connected to the server). And I just trying to figure out, if a clients office burns down how to restore a workstation without replicating the entire URBackup repository, just the images files.
Sorry, this isn’t really an answer to your question, but more of an observation. If your client’s building burns down, then all of the PC hardware will be destroyed, so they have to buy new PCs. Assuming your image files are Windows PCs, I do not believe an image of one PC will run on a different PC - the image of the Windows installation is tied to the hardware. You may be able to restore the image to a different PC, but Windows probably won’t boot - it will fail. Images are really only useful when you have a hard drive failure and want to restore the image onto a new hard drive within the same PC.
In our installation, for the above reason, we decided not to include the disk images in the offsite backup, only the data backups get synced to the cloud.
I guess in short, I really want to spin up a VM with the VHD’s so I get access to the full system quickly.
I was under the impression that this is possible with the recover cd booted in a VM. But in my scenario I will no longer have access to the onsite server. Having the last full VHD and the last incremental VHD and the mbr I can assemble the VHD and restore it to a VM using the recovery CD.
example, I had a client’s sever fail, had a bid for a 50k job that needed to go out that day. I had to go get the server and restore it, took 48hrs with the windows backup software they had been using and a slow USB drive.
rather have spun up the server in a VM and had them back to the day before the crash within minutes not hours.
URBackup does indeed do VHD on Windows which should be possible to convert to a proper format using “kvm-img convert” and then use in any VM (eg. KVM or VMWare) or natively in Hyper-V.
Linux machines will happily boot with different hardware, Windows doesn’t, partially for technical reasons but mostly for licensing reasons. If you really still need to run a Windows Server in this day and age I’d say virtualize it and take a backup of the virtual hard disk.
Backups are for “disaster recovery”, the principal word being “disaster”. A server crashing or dying isn’t a disaster so if the restore window of a backup is unacceptable (you can’t physically restore any faster than the hardware it’s being run on after all) depending on the criticality of the server, either have multiple of them in a proper failover method or have a tested method of booting your disk images quickly (eg. store it on Amazon S3 and then spin up an Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure instance when necessary) or get better hardware for both your backup and it’s restore targets.
I’d use rsync. I think you can get it to only sync the image files using include, exclude and perhaps maxdepth. Make sure to also sync the database backup in urbackup.
The other day I saw that AWS ec2 can import VHDs (and raw image files) and fixes the Windows drivers and license. See Importing a VM as an image using VM Import/Export - VM Import/Export . You’ll have to do the disk image assemble step first, though. You’ll definitely have to test that workflow.