Small Business Server 2008 Backups

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

TrayMonitor v1.1.0

TrayMonitor is a small VB.NET utility that provides a quick overview of performance counters from the system tray.

Each running instance displays a small bar graph corresponding to a performance counter that you select. The results are averaged over a configurable number of samples to provide a smoother animation. Update frequency, colors and maximum values are configurable, and the settings can be saved and loaded from simple, editable configuration files.

By associating the file extension (TMC) with the executable you can quickly start your favorite counters with a double-click, or even add them to your Startup folder so they are running each time you log on.

This project was a bit of a learning exercise for me, and a lot of the code has been borrowed/modified from the ConfigOpt and NotifyIconChart articles at http://www.codeproject.com/ and other places on the w3

You can download the file here, or if you would like a copy of the source code, please send me a quick email.