My travels have taken me around the globe and back. My goal: to track down
some of the world's most experienced IT guides. These are My adventures in IT.
In ancient Mesopotamia, clay tablets were the writing medium of choice.
After being kiln fired, these tablets were hardened and housed in massive
collections, making way for some of the earliest known artifacts.
The preferred media for today's record keeping may seem a bit more durable
at a glance than, say, some dried mud,
but the valuable data inside is fragile and easily lost. So how do we come up
with a backup plan that helps protect our data without encumbering
our business? Well, to help me navigate through this backup quandary, I have enlisted
the help of Tim Daron, an experienced disaster recovery planning IT guide
and a guitarist. Of course, if you are in IT, well, you know you should be doing
backups, and you probably even know how to do backups. A backup is just a part
of your disaster recovery plan. You also have to consider the backup,
the recovery, who is going to do the recovery, and then even who's going to do
the recovery if that person is unavailable, such as like in a natural disaster.
As we know, the world could be a dangerous place. Right? Right. I mean, you have got
computer viruses, ransomware, data corruption, just from general hardware
failures. You have also got the disgruntled employee who might delete
some files or just his accidental deletion, even. Those are all different
kinds of scenarios where you need to consider your disaster recovery plan.
So, Tim, what are we going to go over today? Well, today we are going to talk about
backup, and we are going to specifically talk about using
the Windows feature, Windows Backup, which comes with Windows Server 2016. So how
frequently should backups occur? That really depends on your business.
Of course, your business needs maybe that you have to have your data backed up
every half hour. That is, of course, going to consumer a lot of resources, but you
know, when you recover, it saves you time, right? You don't have to go back
quite so far. Or maybe your business can survive on data that is
a little older. Say, once a day. It really depends on your business.
Should backups be On-Prem or more in the cloud? That's actually a great question
because, you know, obviously, if all your backups are on your premise and
you have a natural disaster that takes out your site. Well, then you are kind
of out, you know? So you have to have a place to put your backups, that are maybe
a little more protected. If the data is available On-Prem, like
in our Storage & Backup solutions, then you are able to recover much faster than
if you have to recover from the cloud. If the worst happens and you lose your actual backups. OK, so once
we have taken into consideration the time and resources components, how
do we form a formidable backup plan? You are going to need to look at how much data and
what kind of data you want to recover, whether it's got a priority or whether
it could be delayed. And then, of course, you want to figure out how much
data you can actually afford to lose, so that determines how frequent
your backups are. And then finally, you got to figure out how much storage
that's all going to require. And if you have enough storage capacity to do the plan
that you have in place. Okay, so what are some of the ways that
Hewlett Packard Enterprise makes backup easier for IT. The HPE
Storage & Backup solution is built with the ProLiant Gen10 server and
specifically designed for a Storage & Backup use case.
These configurations are easy to purchase and easy to deploy. Okay, so can we see
this thing in action? Yeah. So let me show you how to install Windows Backup,
which is a feature Microsoft Windows Server 2016. So we are going to go to the server
manager dashboard and go to “add rules and features”. And this is a feature
so it's not a role. So we are going to skip through the menu to get
to the features. And the next thing you are going to select the server
from the pool, which we only have one server in this instance, so we can just click
next. That's the one that's highlighted.
And on the roles, we can skip that because we are not installing a role
we are installing a feature.
And then when we get to the features tab, we are going to scroll down and find
Windows Server Backup
and select that and hit next. And then always do the restart, unless
you have a reason not to restart. Always select the Restart server automatically,
once the installation is complete and respond to the prompt and hit Install
and, when you hit Install, it's pretty much done. Simple enough. So once
the installation of the feature is done, you can go back into the Windows Server
manager dashboard and go to Tools and drop down to where it says
Windows Server Backup and launch the backup, and I have already got it
actually open here because it does take a little time to get started.
So at this point, you are ready to initiate a backup schedule. The first thing
you want to do is go to Backup Schedule and it's going to prompt you: Do you want
to create a backup schedule?
So let's see, the first thing we are going to do is we want to create. We are going to
hit Next and then you got options, whether you are going to backup the entire
server, which that would be your normal case. Today, we are going to do just
a minimal set just to demonstrate. So we are going to select Custom, which is
another option that you can do. You can actually backup just part of a server.
For instance, maybe you only want to backup just the user data.
We are going to hit Next.
The next thing we are going to do is we are going to add the items that we need
to backup. So we are going to drop down, and just going to browse into
the folder that we are going to set the backup. And I have got a folder already set up
here called Target Data we are going to backup.
Thanks for that. Once it is added, uh, then you can hit next.
And now you are going to specify a time. And this is what, to your question earlier,
how often should you backup? This is where you can actually schedule that,
and typically, once a day is a good choice. But again, that depends on your
business needs. You may need to backup more frequently, or maybe less
frequently.
We are going to select once a day
and now it's… Where do you want to store your backups? Now you have got three
options with Windows Server backup. The first one is to backup to a dedicated
hard drive on that server. So if you have a server that has a single hard
drive or multiple hard drives that are just there for storage of your backup
solution, that's a good option because it kind of speeds the process along.
But that also dedicates a drive just to backup because you can't use that drive
for anything else. It's actually going to wipe the drive and configure it
in a hidden fashion so nobody else can access it because it's dedicated
strictly for backups.
The next volume… The next option for backup target is to backup to
a specific volume, such as a folder on a hard drive that you have that's not
related to the backup folder that you are backing up. So, for instance,
if you have two volumes on your computer, you can backup one volume to the other
volume. But you can't backup a volume to itself because obviously that would
just put that volume at risk, should something happen to that data. Yeah.
So that's another option. And the last option is to backup to something
called a Shared Folder, like on the network you might have a folder that is shared
from another computer, and you can actually backup your data to that
shared computer, onto a different machine. The caveat here with that is,
is that every time you do a backup, it's going to overwrite that job so it
doesn't keep historical jobs like the other two options does.
So we are going to actually demonstrate doing a backup to a volume
on the local machine.
Wii are going to hit next.
And now it's going to ask you to select the volume. So we are going to add
the volume, and here we are going to select the volume that I have already configured
for that purpose
and hit next.
And now it just prompts you that you want to confirm that this is the
setting and, yes, we want to do this.
So once you are done, this little wizard is going to then create this backup
job, which will go in your scheduled tasks. I have scheduled it for a time
that is much later than right now. So we are just going to run a backup job
manually. So I am just going to select the job, and then we will drop down and hit Run
and this prompt comes up and says: Oh, well, this job is not able to be run
manually. You have to go into the settings and actually configure that.
So we are going to drop out of this notification
and then open the properties
and go over to the settings tab and select Allow this task to be run on
demand. That will enable us to run this at any time rather than waiting for it
to automatically run by itself. Now once again, I have selected the job and
we are going to hit Run,
and it's already done. Once your backup job is done, and this is something that
you want to do is an administrator on a regular basis, is to check the logs
to make sure your backup actually occurred and make sure there were
no errors. So we are going to drop back to the Windows Server Backup window,
and we are just going to look at our log. And there is our log for today that
we just ran in an automated fashion. All right, so we see that the description
shows that it was successful. If there were any errors in the job,
it would have notified you there. And the next thing you want to do is actually
check to make sure that job was created in the backup volume that we created.
That it always goes in the same folder called Windows Image Backup. We will drill
down into that. And here you can look up into the backup folder
and you can see that there it is. There is a backup job there, at 10: 53 and
these are all the previous jobs that were taken.
And then you can also check the logs, the log folder shows any errors. And,
of course, the one we just ran at 10:53 and let’s resort this. There it is.
So if you open that, hopefully what you are going to see is just what you see here.
It's empty. There is no errors. So that's exactly what you want to see.
But if there were errors, it would actually logged them
in this file.
And that's pretty much it for backups. Great, backups are backed up. Guess
it's time to go home. Call it a day. Well, you are not really done yet.
Part of your backup solution needs to consider also that you can actually recover
your data. So that's actually in our next video. This adventure is to be
continued. Stay tuned for the next part of Backup & Recovery.