Using Third-Party Backup Tools

Third-party backup tools have been mentioned previously in the chapter. They can add valuable functionality to a disaster recovery plan providing additional features above and beyond those found in SBS Backup.

Examples of such functionality are the capability to create disk images, even bootable disk images that can be used to restore a system from a USB or firewire attached hard disk drive, or restore from a bootable floppy disk.

Brick level backups of Exchange Mailboxes can speed up recovery of individual mailboxes. You would need to use exmerge or the Recovery Storage group to get the same functionality with the default tools. Similarly, they may support full, incremental, or differential SQL Server backups; remote SQL Server backups; and restoration of SQL Server data to an alternate SQL server.

Some third-party backup software solutions allow for network backup, so workstations can be backed up, cloned, and even restored remotely, and many provide remote console control of the server backup and remote view of the running backup process. Some third-party backup solutions also support VSS backup of Microsoft Exchange as they incorporate the VSS Requestor.

To deal with larger backups, third-party applications can do backups cascading to multiple storage devices and support tape changers and optical media such as CD and DVD or even to an FTP device.

At the file level third-party applications can also provide global exclusion filtering and overwrite options such as newer, always, never, and overwrite of Open files. There is also support for file compression.

In many ways these are more up-to-date applications meeting the needs of larger storage, modern hardware and storage media, and both faster and easier recovery. NTBackup is adequate, and with the SBS Backup Wizard wrapper can be a good, inexpensive solution for small businesses.

The right choice of software should be determined by the strategy that best fits the business requirements and the disaster recovery plan.