Hi,
I'm looking for a file server back up solution. We have several 2003 servers that replicate data through several sites with DFSR. This obviously protects against disk failure or loss of a server, but not against accidental or malicious deletion and corrupted data.
I was thinking of a backup product on one server that would start with an full backup and then ongoing nightly incremental backups. This should mean deleted files and different file versions can be recovered.
With this in mind I tried the trial of NovaStor Server backup product. Although it seemed to work fine to start with, it soon started to backup far too much on the incrementals, usually every other backup session. The support team have informed me of the following :
I am sure this can be explained when looking at the way NovaBACKUP finds "changed" files, as these files are the ones that are backed up in an incremental backup. NovaBACKUP goes solely via the file's archive bit, to find the changed files since the last backup. The archive bit is a file attribute that is set either by an application changing the file, or via the OS when the file changed. And with an incremental backup, the archive bit gets unset by NovaBACKUP, once the file has been backed up. So a disruption in this process can cause all the files to have the archive bit set and thus NovaBACKUP backing up all those files.
Whilst it may be accurate, it isn't really helpful. My best guess is that DFSR inteferes with the attribute, although google doesn't yield much on this.
So I am looking for an alternative solution.
It is only data files, there are no considerations for SQL, Exchange, System State etc.
I need an incremental backup so I can recover different file version and files deleted long ago. Although perhaps with a different way of handling them than NovaStor.
The ability to search for a file across the backup set to fidn a deleted file would be handy.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Thanks.
Matt
