Windows Certification:: Backup

I've used two of OnStream's 30GB Echo drives: the USB30 external USB drive and the DI30 internal IDE drive. Both products were useful as tape backups but lacking as standalone drives.

OnStream's Echo drives appear to your system as removable drives, similar to an Iomega Zip drive. You can easily copy files to and from an Echo drive. However, keep in mind that this is a tape drive, so performance suffers during direct copy or retrieval actions. The Echo drives come with the vendor's Echo backup software, which provides good backup capability and lets you allocate system memory for cache on the drives. Using the Echo software, you can also change the delay-write and cache-flush intervals, which can improve the drives' performance during file copy or backup procedures. However, the Echo software isn't compatible with Windows 2000 Server or Windows NT Server 4.0 , and you need Echo 3.2 to use the Echo drives with Win2K Professional or Windows Me. In fact, the USB30 drive won't work with NT Server 4.0 regardless of software. (OnStream does offer SCSI units that will work with NT Server 4.0 and alternative backup software.)

Installing the OnStream USB30 drive is a hassle. But as backup units, OnStream's 30GB drives give you a good money-to-megabyte ratio and set you back only about $45 per tape. (The drives cost about $290.) Performance is surprisingly good for such inexpensive media.

Windows XP includes a new backup option known as ASR to create a backup set that you can use to automatically restore Windows after a system crash. I recommend that you use this backup option to regularly create up-to-date ASR sets.

The ASR backup consists of a backup of the system files that ASR requires for Windows to function and a 3.5" disk that contains information about your system that ASR requires to start the restore process. The ASR backup doesn't back up data files, so you need to back them up separately.

To create an ASR backup, perform the following steps:

Start NT Backup (go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Backup).
When the wizard version of NT Backup starts, click Advanced Mode.
From the Tools menu, select ASR Wizard, then click Next on the introduction screen.
Select a destination for the backup.
Click Finish to begin the ASR backup process.
When prompted, insert a blank 3.5" disk to back up your system settings.

How can I enable Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshots in Windows Server 2003?

To enable VSS snapshots (aka Shadow Copies) for a particular drive, perform the following steps:

Open Windows Explorer or the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Disk Management snap-in, then right-click the drive.
Select Properties from the context menu.
Select the Shadow Copies tab.
Under "Select a volume," select the volume for which you want to enable Shadow Copies.
Click Settings to configure VSS. (If you don't configure the default settings, Windows 2003 will use a default configuration that creates a Shadow Copy on the selected drive at 07:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. every weekday).
In the displayed dialog box, configure the settings to tell Windows 2003 where you want VSS to store the Shadow Copies (you can specify only the drive--you can't specify a folder) and the maximum amount of space to use for the Shadow Copies (at least 100MB), then click Schedule.
From the drop-down list in the Schedule dialog box, select a time to make a scheduled Shadow Copy. After you select a time, you can use the options in the dialog box to specify when VSS runs (i.e., the date and time). You can also click New to create a new schedule. For example, you might want to schedule the system to make a Volume Copy on Saturday at 7:00 a.m. and on Sunday at 7:00 a.m. Click OK after you finish selecting the scheduling options.
Click OK to exit the main Settings dialog box.

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