Home Forums Discussions IT, Networking, PCs and more A Tale of Woe: Only Partial Backups

I will not be naming names.

I got a frantic call last month from a client, and great guy, I have known for years and years. He was desperate. The hard drive in his computer died. The only backups he had was the Amazing Charts backup of the database, not the imported items.

Let me repeat that: Amazing Charts backup of the database only, no imported items.

He sent me the drive to see if I could recover it. I'm not a drive recovery expert, but thought I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately, no dice. I sent the drive back and he is now speaking with a professional drive recovery firm.

A few thoughts:

As I've said before, VIRTUALIZE. Backing up the entire VM is far less problematic than attempting to backup individual files inside.

Second, stop using workstations as servers. Get a real server.

Third, Amazing Charts' backup is utterly inadequate. While it may get the database and imported items, it leaves out everything else. All the other files you have on that server? Gone. All the work you spent setting up third part interfaces? Gone. You now have to go through all the hours of rebuilding the server from scratch, re-installing all your software, including AC, restore AC backups, then call all your third party guys and get them to set up interfaces all over again. ALL UNPLANNED DOWNTIME.

However, if you restore the entire VM, you get all that stuff back in one fell swoop. Bang. Done. End of line.

For the love of all things green, good, and Holy, please all of you start taking backups more seriously. If you don't want to do your backups yourself, call me and I'll do them for you for both onsite and offsite. Note that I support Hyper-V backups only so you may be in for some Big Changes.

If you are doing your backups yourself, test those backups. Get a spare computer and try to do a restore. If you find yourself fumbling, not knowing what to do, reaching for the phone to call me on a Saturday night while I'm playing World of Warcraft which will incur steep billable hours, then it is truly high time to re-think your backup strategy.

JamesNT

As I have said in the past I have used VMware and it worked fine. I felt it made my server a little slower that If I just loaded the server with windows / AC. Drove me crazy.
I use a Dell server with a NVME setup and It's fast as It can be considering the Medical office has all most run out of space for the free MS SQL server.
I use Veeam as my primary backup and I also use Second copy to copy files to another backup location. I grab the backup folder and the Import Items.
If anyone thinks I should get anything else., drop me a note.

The first recommendation I have is to get off VMWare. Prices have jumped up considerably since the Broadcom takeover so when your next renewal comes up you may get your feeling hurt. Severely.

JamesNT

Running free MS SQL server with xGB memory cache limit. If hitting performance limits from this, consider using an optane nvme drive for AC. It's random access is so fast it's similar to having the entire database in memory. I'm pretty sure performance is now limited by ancient AC code.