This article updates our May 2005 story that focused primarily on bare metal recovery for small business networks. We’re pleased to observe that some stalwarts on the server side remain vital and active in this market, and that some interesting new players have entered the scene as well.

For server and workstation recovery, we include the following products in this discussion:

Symantec Backup Exec 11d System Recovery Windows Small Business Server Edition plus Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition (12 licenses) Yosemite Backup Standard Master Server for Microsoft Small Business Server with Bare Metal Disaster Recovery Option Shadow Protect Small Business Server Edition 3

On the workstation side, we look into two well-known commercial backup products that include good bare-metal recovery capabilities - namely, Norton Ghost 12.0 and Acronis True Image 11.0. We also cover the Windows Vista Backup and Recovery Center, the much-improved successor to NTbackup.exe. A similar application will be available in Windows Server 2008, which includes a backup option that works for bare metal recovery in a pinch.

One big change in products since the 2005 story is that all of them back up to hard disks as their storage medium of choice. With enormous hard disks and tape drives that have difficulty matching HD capacities and remaining affordable, external hard disks or storage arrays have emerged as the backup repositories of choice for all sorts of SOHO situations and beyond. Disk backup remains particularly appropriate for small business environments because of its speed and availability advantages: disk is much faster than tape, and disk backups are almost always online, saving the need to find and mount the right tape.

The Rationale Behind Bare Metal Backup

Bare metal backup and recovery (BMBR) products are great for SOHO operations. The best of these products lets you back up and then restore servers and sometimes networked workstations at either the level of discrete files or the entire disk volume. When you restore a disk volume to a new empty disk drive, this is what’s called "bare metal recovery" or "disaster recovery."

Most products let you restore to a drive temporarily mounted in any computer. Most also let you boot your original repaired computer from a CD-ROM and restore your disk drive from CD-ROM, a second disk drive connected to the computer, a disk on the network or, in some cases, tape. Bare metal recoveries save lots of time - they can take less than one-sixth the time of a discrete file recovery. That’s because they operate at the disk image level and can write disk content sequentially as fast as the I/O channel will allow. No jumping around for individual files is needed, nor lots of individual file I/O activities like opening, writing, closing, and updating directory information for each file.

Some readers may be concerned that BMBR solutions are prohibitively expensive. There’s some ground for concern here, but the products we’ve chosen don’t add huge amounts per seat to a small network’s overall costs. They provide substantial peace of mind when it comes to protecting key productivity and information assets like the servers and workstations everybody depends on to get their jobs done and to conduct business. For small shops using Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS), two of the three server products mentioned here come in special packages designed to handle Microsoft’s do-it-all offering for shops with fewer than 25 users.

We maintain the following assumptions that were made for the original article that this story updates:

Your computer system supports about a dozen users. You use Microsoft Windows Server 2003, or its SBS equivalent. You have one server to back up, probably Microsoft Windows SBS. You run either Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, or both. You want to back up networked user machines as well as your server (up to 12 clients).