"Disaster Recovery"

[GeneralEclectic]

I'm a long time Retrospect user, who, fortunately, has never had the need to rebuild a completely crashed system from a Retrospect backup. I've made "disaster recovery" disks with previous versions (on XP only) but never actually exercised one. Now with Windows 7, Retrospect version 7.7, and the new downloadable disk for disaster recovery, we appear to have a whole new approach to it. Which brings me to my first question: (1) Where is the documentation on this new disaster recovery disk? I've searched everywhere and have found nothing but references to the old type.

 

The second issue users and admins of Windows 7 installations should be concerned about involves the "hidden" 100MB boot partition that Win 7 creates. It appears to me (again, I can find not a single word of documentation on this subject) that Retrospect, the Windows 7-compatible version, that is, pays absolutely no attention to this necessary part of the Win 7 installation. I think this may be a result of the "file backup" orientation of the product, but it seems to me that there should be a way to rebuild a system from an uninitialized disk in order to consider Retrospect a viable backup solution. So question (2) is: How do you rebuild a complete system, including the boot partition properly aligned for SSDs.

 

I also want to point out that Microsoft's new backup utility takes care of everything with its image backup and system repair disk. If you have a system image and that disk, you are completely covered for rebuilding a functional installation on a new uninitialized disk (and you can accomplish the entire operation on a 40GB system partition in about 20-30 minutes, start to desktop). Can the Retrospect folks say the same thing?

 

Edit: I just found the addendum that describes use of the emergency recovery disk. It still doesn't answer my question about the boot partition. It does address the matter of use of a "raw" disk -- it can't use one. I don't think that's an acceptable level of functionality, frankly.

Edited March 30, 2010 by Guest

[Mayoff]

The bootable CD will create the hidden partition when you do a full restore of the entire hard disk from a Windows 7 Backup.

[GeneralEclectic]

Thanks for the clarification, but I think there's a problem in the vague wording of this section of the addendum:

 

Preparing Your Hard Disk Drive for Recovery

In some cases, you may need to partition of format the hard disk drive in your computer before you can proceed with the Emergency Recovery process.

 

I read that as requiring the user to partition the disk separately from the "Emergency Recovery Process". At best, the wording is unnecessarily confusing and vague.

 

Moreover, where in this Addendum does it specifically address the Boot Partition? It doesn't. It makes the reader guess about it. How is the Boot Partition created? Is it backed up in the backup set as part of the routine backup procedure? If so, how? Is the Boot Partition correctly aligned for SSD? Who knows?

 

This section needs some work.

[dan.jordan]

Thanks for the clarification, but I think there's a problem in the vague wording of this section of the addendum:

 

Preparing Your Hard Disk Drive for Recovery

In some cases, you may need to partition of format the hard disk drive in your computer before you can proceed with the Emergency Recovery process.

 

I read that as requiring the user to partition the disk separately from the "Emergency Recovery Process". At best, the wording is unnecessarily confusing and vague.

 

Moreover, where in this Addendum does it specifically address the Boot Partition? It doesn't. It makes the reader guess about it. How is the Boot Partition created? Is it backed up in the backup set as part of the routine backup procedure? If so, how? Is the Boot Partition correctly aligned for SSD? Who knows?

 

This section needs some work.

 

Agreed. If the product is great but the documentation has holes in the wrong places it can turn into a land mine for the administrator trying to recover a server by using that great product.

 

General, which Microsoft backup product were you referring to?