Basic Characteristics Of Network/Server Backup
All three of the server-inclusive BMBR products - namely, Symantec Backup Exec SBS Edition, Yosemite Backup for Microsoft SBS, and Shadow Protect SBS - can be instructed to perform a complete, total backup the first time they're run, and then to back up only incremental changes thereafter. This saves substantial amounts of disk space. In fact, all of these programs can also prune their backup trees (the hierarchical collection of files and folders within a backup set), to eliminate older, duplicated files. If you enable pruning, this limits how far you can roll back your server - because pruned duplicates are no longer available - but this feature also helps conserve on disk space as well.
All three of these offerings also have the desirable feature of being able to install a backup on hardware that differs from the system from which the original backup was generated. This is important, because repairing or replacing the system that gets put to work to take over when bare metal recovery is needed seldom results in an identical hardware configuration. All of these products can even use generic NIC drivers to deal with changes at the network interface level, and can interact with the network to grab the backup image from network-attached storage or a shared network drive. Invariably, one of these situations will describe where the backup data must come from when performing a bare metal restore. Some of these products can even switch between physical systems and virtual environments for source and target with equal aplomb.
Backup
All three of these BMBR applications use wizards and Windows-Explorer-like interfaces to make backup and recovery a relatively simple process. Most of them also offer something analogous to "expert mode" operation, where you can get down and dirty with the interface and various switches and options at a low level of detail. They also support remote operation, with one machine on the network directing backup (and as much as possible, restore) over the wire as well.
The Backup Exec front-end console for selecting and launching backups is both reminiscent of Windows Explorer, and fairly typical for this type of application.
To back up a disk, you click on its entry in the Drive pane at the center of the window, then click "Create Recovery Point" in the right hand Tasks pane. To recover the drive, you click "Recover drive" instead. This automatically enables bare metal recovery, if that's what is specified as the target for the recovery operation. Additional screens let you pick your target, establish compression levels, enable encryption (backup) or decrypt images (recovery), and so forth.
All three of the products include support for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server. This is as you'd expect, because those elements belong to the collection that makes up Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. These programs include agents that use Microsoft APIs to back up SQL Server and Exchange databases while they are open. This includes use of the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSCS) APIs to briefly halt database activity long enough to take snapshots of active databases in Windows 2003, including not just the aforementioned programs but also Active Directory.
In addition, all three of these products work with other VSCS products, including Microsoft Exchange 2003 and SQL Server 2005 (for those who may have updated these components within SBS). For other databases that aren't VSCS compatible, these products include batch mode utilities that stop related services prior to backup, then restart them when the backup is finished. This really helps to illustrate why these products made the effort to support VSCS for key services (Exchange and SQL Server), to avoid the stop, backup, restart routine. For non-VSCS services, this means scheduling batch files that handle this three-step maneuver on your behalf during non-peak hours, or handling the task manually yourself.
Of course, you can also schedule backups of various kinds (complete, incremental, differential, and so forth) with all three of these applications. Each one offers a friendly and intelligible interface for scheduling such tasks.
