How can I take a one time full backup of a Windows Server without the need for a restore program?

Question

I have a Windows SBS server with about 500GB of data that I'm decommissioning but I'd like to take a final backup of the server and place it on an external USB drive.

I already have multiple backups of the server on disk from the past but they are through Simpana Commvault.

I'd like a backup that will simply copy the file structure, ACLs, timestamps, etc. as is to a NTFS volume on the external drive. This way if someone says "I need x file on the server you decommed" I can search the external drive real quick instead of firing up Commvault, cataloging, restore, etc.

I know the built-in Windows backup is great, I just don't feel like running it for a restore job on this. I'd like an option where in the future it won't require a program to run a restore. Rather a simple mount of the drive will suffice.

I believe I can use robocopy just fine, but I'm not sure if it will grab the Windows directory, system files, and full user profiles correctly even with the /ZB option.

Options?

Is Robocopy /E /ZB /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT /MT:32 /R:5 /W:5 /LOG:copylog.log the way to go here?

Answer 1

A simple solution might be to use something like disk2vhd. This will create a VHD file, which a drive image format that is compatible with Hyper-V, and can also be directly mounted on Windows 7/2008 R2 and above. VHD files can also be converted so you could boot into a VM compatible with Vmware hypervisors, Virtual box and other popular visualization tools.

The one issue I have found is that disk2vhd does have some issues with the Windows software RAID. If you are using this, you may need to use something else.

As with all backups verify it by attach to it on another system.

You can run it directly on the HOST OS. It will use VSS, but you should stop most services for the best results.

Answer 2

One mildly crazy-seeming option would be to boot up a Linux live disk and use dd to make a bit-for-bit copy of the entire drive.

Basically:

1. Make Linux live disk (CD or USB key)
2. Boot from it
3. Attach the external USB drive (must be same size or larger than system drive)
4. Figure out which device is the original system drive and which is the USB drive.
5. Run something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 -- but replace sda and sdc with the devices you figured out in step 4. if= is for the system device and of= is for the external USB drive.

This is not the fastest method, since it doesn't know to skip over unused blocks, but it is guaranteed to get everything. The drive should even be bootable.

Answer 3

You can use a Clonezilla live boot CD to image the Windows system to an external USB hard drive (or image on a network volume).

The CD has full support for the HPSA/CCISS hardware RAID controller in the ProLiant server you have, so all everything will be recognized.

Relevant documentation.

Answer 4

Assuming nobody is using the server anymore (so there won't be any issues with locked files, or people creating new ones while you are copying), robocopy should work just fine, but there will be a few issues:

• Looking at the permissions from another computer will probably only show you the SIDs, not the actual usernames, since those are tied to the SBS server
• You may have to reset the permissions on all the files anyways to be able to read them. Not an issue as long as you are an administrator on the computer you're reading it from, just a hassle.
• You won't easily be able to access anything that's not just a simple file - exchange data, SQL server stuff, etc.

If all that's acceptable, go right ahead with robocopy.

My preferred way of dealing with decommissioned servers is to use the Hyper-V or VMware tools to do P2V conversion. That gives me a disk image I can actually boot and login to the server, and recovery whatever is needed. Then after testing it I store that disk image on an external hard drive or our NAS, so it's not cluttering up our actual virtual machine hosts but is easily available when we need it.

As an added bonus for Hyper-V, you can just take the vhd file and mount it from a windows computer, without having to actually boot it. Not sure if there's a similar feature for VMware.

Answer 5

I'm a big fan of SelfImage even though the homepage is dead and you have to download it elsewhere.

Run it as an administrator and it will create a partition level or disk level backup, either to a disk image file or another partition or disk, and skips empty space. It works without Linux, without a reboot, without nagging about open files.

It's small, simple, free, and in my experience very very useful.