Hi Spice People,
I just started work for a small school of about 200 students and will double in a year or two.
This school is a new school and is freshly setup there have been a few techs here to service the school but now being the full time front man for the school I am now made responsible for everything I.T. My first and foremost concern is ‘Backups!’
My question today is looking at the current backup solution all they really have is a standard ‘Windows server backup’ on their 2008 R2 Server a full VSS backup of all drives, system state, Bare metal recovery on the file server/domain controller. They switch between alternating usb disks 1tb portable drives and the operations managers takes these home daily.
My concerns are these:
Just to note currently we don’t have any critical Education Software hosted onsite but this is not to say that it won’t happen, as the school is investing in some money in the future to purchase some student software and will most likely host these onsite.
I basically really want to get a good hold of the backup situation and recovery process before investing the time to look at a complete secondary backup solution.
• Since the school is growing significantly is this backup regime enough and scalable for 200+ Students? We are surely going to run out of space on those 1tb drives..
• Is this backup regime sufficient enough if I wanted to do a full restore of my 2008 Server OS/Active directory? Can anyone from experience tell me that they have had to go through the ropes of doing a VSS restore on their DC/File Server and was relatively simple and painless?
• Should I be looking into full image solutions such as Acronis as a secondary backup plan just in case the standard ‘Windows Server Backup’ fails?
• Does anyone have a good backup regime suitable for a school environment?
Looking forward to your responses Spice techs