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JoelCagle-5062 avatar image
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JoelCagle-5062 asked ElevenYu-MSFT commented

How to automaticlly restore a daily backup to an off site server.

Hello, here is my problem. I have a server running server 2016 Essentials. We take a system image every month and then daily backups every night. I have restored my system image to a second server and have it in the rack as a backup to my production server. What I need to do is take the daily backups from server A and have server B automatically restore that backup so it is always up to date. I can't see to figure out how to schedule this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

windows-serverwindows-server-backup
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ElevenYu-MSFT avatar image
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ElevenYu-MSFT answered ElevenYu-MSFT commented

Hi,

From Windows side, we could only schedule daily backup but there is no option to restore the backups automatically every day. You will need to manually trigger the restore from the backup.

Actually, daily backups should be enough to protect your server and its data. Restore will be proceeded only when you have a server that goes sideways, or some data is accidentally deleted or corrupted.

You could store the daily backups data on an external storage drives or a network shared folder that can be accessed by server B. In this situation, the server B can have the update-to-date backup data. You can manually restore the latest backup on server B at any time.

For your reference:
Manage Server Backup in Windows Server Essentials
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-essentials/manage/manage-server-backup-in-windows-server-essentials

Thanks,


If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it. Thanks.

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Thanks, I do keep the backups in an off site NAS, and I do have the ability to have server B pull the latest backup. I was hoping for an automatic solution to save me the time of doing this manually. Thanks again for the reply.

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Thanks for your further clarification.

Windows backup feature has no such feature. Maybe you will need to search to check if there is third-party could meet your requirement.

Appreciate your understanding.

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Hi @JoelCagle-5062

Thank you for posting your requirement to Q&A forum.

We suggest that you could post this automatic restore feature requirement to Microsoft To Do UserVoice or Windows Feedback Hub.

Since there is no further question, It will be much appreciated and encouraged if you could click "Accept Answer" and upvote the helpful reply.

Thanks alot


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MotoX80 avatar image
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MotoX80 answered JoelCagle-5062 commented

I'm not familiar with 2016 Essentials, but based on my server experience, I do have a few thoughts.

You don't say what backup software you are using or what problems you are encountering. We could assume that you are using whatever basic backup tool that Essentials provides, but it would be better if you would describe the environment and provide specifics of the issues.

When I did disaster recovery tests, the main problem that I had was having two servers on the network with the same name at the same time. So if we restored the OS from one machine to another, we had to shut down the "real" server, to avoid a conflict with the "DR test" server. So, are you renaming the backup server? Are both servers on the network at the same time? How are you handling IP addresses and DNS entries?

The title to your question says about "off site server", but the body of your question says "a second server and have it in the rack as a backup". So is it really an off site server or is it another server in the same rack as your main server?

From my experience, you have 3 main areas to address:

  1. Day to day "please restore my file because I accidentally deleted it." requests.

  2. Full disaster recovery because the entire building that houses the main server was blown away by some natural disaster.

  3. A ransomware attack where some account on your network has been compromised and the files on any network share that it has update access to has been encrypted. That could include backup files.

It would appear that many users set up backup to address item #1. They know that #2 is a real possibility, but they can't get management/ownership to pay for the cost of having a true off site DR environment. (That's what I ran into!) I would recommend getting an acknowledgment in writing where your manager recognizes that the company may be forced out of business because they don't want to pay for a true DR solution.

For #3, the company that I used to work for got hit with ransomware on multiple occasions. We just restored the files from backup and moved on. We used both Commvault and Tivoli Storage Manager to backup servers over the network. Backup data was initially stored on disk on the backup server and then migrated to tape. At no time was any backup data exposed via a network share where some compromised account could encrypt the backup data. The backup servers were also locked down to minimize the number of admin accounts. We also had backups to the backups for a worst case scenario.

For the problem that you described, a simple robocopy that would mirror the data from primary to backup could work, but if an admin account were compromised, then both your primary and backup data could be encrypted by ransomware since robocopy would work over network shares.

Does Essentials support DFS replication? You could mirror the files to another off site server.

Have you looked at any of the Azure backup/DR solutions?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/backup-and-disaster-recovery/

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Thanks for the reply, I am just using windows built in backup, and while server B is in the same data center it is in a different rack/cage/network setup for all cold standby servers. I appreciate your reply, but I see my question was too vague. I have my production server running daily backups, and they are stored truly off site in a huge disk array. I was asking if there was a solution, using Windows Backup, where server B could connect to this repository, and automatically pull the latest backup and and restore it. This way my back up server is always up to date, but keeping them on separate networks. I am just trying to save my self the time suck of having to do this manually. Thanks again for your input!

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