I just watched Sean Daniels' video on some of the new SBS 2008 features, where he gives a sneak peek of the new backup procedure. He mentions that it is snapshot-based using VSS and geared towards (multiple) external USB/FireWire drives. This brought up a few immediate concerns for me:
- It sounds like it could re-introduce some of the hassles that differential and incremental backups used to pose for many tape users. My understanding was that SBS tried to remove this complexity by enforcing daily full backups.
- External drives are generally IDE/SATA based and have a relatively high failure rate (often due to poor cooling). What happens when one fails? What if it’s the one that contains your very first backup?
I'll post the answers to these questions as soon as I have them...
UPDATE: In response to my questions, Sean has been kind enough to start a FAQ here: http://sbs.seandaniel.com/2008/03/small-business-server-2008-backup-q.html.
The short version is that both of these issues have been addressed by including a full backup on each bacup drive from which the incremental backups on the same drive are calculated. Only one good drive is required for a complete restore.
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