Guys,
Happy new year! It's time to upgrade my server - I'm going to go to something that sucks a bit less power:
-CPU: i7-920 --> i7-3770k (which takes me from 130W to 77W, AND gives me integrated graphics!)
-MB: modified Asus Rampage II Gene --> Asus P8Z77 Pro (which gives me 4 additional SATA ports - the old MB only had 4)
-OS storage: 500GB laptop HD --> Samsung 840 pro 256 GB
-Case: something old and loud --> Corsair Obsidian 550D (should be much quieter)
-Additional storage: I'm adding a couple of additional WD black 2 GB internal HDs to the system.
I have all of the components - they're sitting on or near my desk, waiting to be taken out of their boxes and assembled...and I'm fearing the process of restoring from backup to the new SSD. I back up the server OS to a large external HD every day, but a) I back up the OS only - not the shared server folders, the email database, or the media directory, which all sit on separate hard drives (including a DrivePool share); and b ) I've never had a good experience with the built-in backup on ANY Windows product...so this is going to require a huge leap of faith for me.
AndrewNZ's post from another thread does a good job of summarizing my fears here:
You're after a rock solid backup system that you can set and forget, AND guarantee will work if something goes wrong.
Sorry to say, you're probably out of luck.
First. No backup system is guaranteed to work, although some are much more reliable than others
Second. With any backup system, you need to periodically check to make certain the backups are working as expected.
What you're asking for is enterprise grade backups, with no effort by you, so your only option is to pay someone to implement and manage a system for you.
Time to decide how important your data is, and how much trouble you want to go to to protect it.
But Drashna's follow-up post almost a month later encourages me a little:
In fact, I *just* used Server Backup to restore my server last night. A weird issue that was ENTIRELY caused by me. Rolled it back to a month ago, and rebooted. Was up and running right away. Was the first time that I've every actually needed it (I had used it to clone the system disk to a SSD, but that doesn't really count). So it's fairly intuitive, works well, and you're forced to use it or ignore it on Essentials.
I guess what I'm wondering here is the following: should I be feeling the fear I do? Is my fear baseless or is it well-founded? Should I worry about restoring the OS only when I have so much important data on other HDs? Are there steps I can take, either before taking down the old server, or when setting up the new one, that will decrease the likelihood that something goes wrong with the restore?
Phillip