I've recently installed Windows Server 2012 Essentials for my small business. I'm thinking about backup in the event of disaster.
I've got software RAID 1 on 2 x disks, client backup to the server for the 8 or so Windows 7 / 8 clients on the network and I've also set up file backup for documents via the Azure cloud service.
My thoughts are now turning to protecting the Windows server in the event of a hardware failure (like hard disk failure) i.e. I want to ensure I capture a copy of all those time consuming server configurations that I have put in place. So my focus is on having a backup for the server configurations and I'm not too worried at the moment about backups for files such as Word & Excel files.
I've done some reading and it appears I need to get an external USB drive to perform some server backups. I'm also aware that as part of the restore process I will need the original install DVD that will then ask for a pointer to a copy of a recent backup (likely to be on the external USB drive).
What I am unsure about is:
1 - How does the server restore process know about the external USB drive with the backup on it if the hard drives are yet to be setup?
2 - Is there an alternative to using an external USB drive such as creating a bootable USB stick with both the Operating System and particular server configuration on it? I see that there is facility via the Server dashboard to "Create Key" in Devices >> Customise Computer Backup and File History settings >> Tools. Can anybody explain the role of this facility in the dashboard?
3 - Similar to 2 above is there a way of creating a bootable DVD with the server op system and configuration on it?
Any help would be greatly appreciated