Windows Server 2008R2 Backup Question

[fifthcusp]

My wife runs a small dental practice and we have a Dell Server running Windows 2008 Server R2. For disaster recovery we purchased 2 identical servers, one which we keep at home in case something happens to the one in the office. My IT guy when we set it up - did a Bare Metal Restore on the Home server to copy the exact configuration of the office server. I would periodically like to update or clone the server at home to the exact configuration in the office as we change things in the office. What is my best option to do this?

Should I take a full server backup on a portable drive and do a Bare Metal Restore periodically on the server at Home or do I need to just copy the system state onto the server at home. The server at home has windows 2008R2 already setup.

I don't have a lot of computer experience, but can do basic backups and restore and don't want to pay my IT guy every time I have to do something like this.

Any help in simple laymans terms would be greatly appreciated

[teethdood]

Your best bet would be to copy the following folders to your portable HDD then transfer that to your server at home:
C:\Program Files\Open Dental (or wherever you installed your main open dental software)
C:\mysql
C:\opendentimages
C:\whateveryourX-rayfolderis (eg. c:\XDR)
C:\whateverelseyouwant

Of course you can do drive cloning as well, but then you'd be cloning possible malware/viruses that's causing the main server to go down in the first place.

[Manny Ramirez]

I guess you can always back up to a virtual disk. Ask your IT guy about Windows 2008 P2V migration. This will allow you to backup an entire systems to a virtual hard drive and then restore it to a virtual machine in your home server. You can keep multiple copies. That way you can always restore back in time. Backups, Backups, you can never have enough backups

[bpcomp]

If you are running Server 2008R2 then you almost certainly have a domain. I would NOT recommend only backing up folders like Open Dental ONLY, this will not retain any changes to your domain. Manny has a good suggestion with the physical to virtual (P2V). That being said, Teethdood's suggestion of backing up the folders is a great thing to do in addition to other backups. There are lots of options available and I would recommend going with the one that is fairly easy to implement and that you feel you understand. If you have other backups in place then you can probably do a full clone of the server once every month and restore a backup of the latest data if needed. You will see many times on this forum that many people recommend running your server as a virtual machine for ease of backup and recovery.

In our office, we have a couple of virtual servers. We have the ones that don't change and are not on a regular backup schedule... (old practice management with no change in data). We also have the server that gets new data everyday. I make a full clone of that virtual machine every night and copy it to a backup machine AND a USB drive. We also have a different backup running that copies the data out of the server onto a different USB drive.

If running a virtual server is beyond what you are willing to do, then to directly answer your question; I personally would feel more comfortable doing a bare metal restore rather than a system state copy.

I've worked with several kinds of backups and I'm leery of anything that does some sort of incremental. When the system is stable then the incrementals work like a champ but when things go south, it's always been the full backup that has succeeded.