Best Practices

Does someone have a "best practices" type document on properly setting up Acronis to do scheduled backup images, prepare for disaster recovery, etc.

I'm using True Image Enterprise Server, True Image Workstation, and Universal Restore on both Windows based systems.

I'm a new Acronis user and it is hard to convey to my boss what is the best way to do things with this software at my workplace at this time. We are a 24x7 public safety organization. I'm trying to insure everything is done the best way before a potential disaster strikes.

Thanks...

Steve

 

Hopefully you will get some good info from this forum.

Acronis is just a tool that allows you to make backups of various types such as full, differential and incremental. It is not a disaster recovery plan and knows nothing about the big picture should something fail; for example, it doesn't know that you have good backups but they were sitting on top of the compter when it caught fire.

Disaster recovery for an organization can be a very large topic even if it is just related to information technology systems covering far more than a busted drive such as alternate power systems, even alternate systems to run your operation on should your building be destroyed.

I suggest you consider speaking to other organizations that do the same thing you do and find out how they backup and restore their systems along with any other topics of interest such as alternate power or whatever. No sense trying to re-invent the wheel.

However, on a more simple side, you can at various times ask yourself if the system crashed right now: what have I lost, what would I need to do to recover it, how long would it take, and the big question - would I be fired!

 

Yes, you are right about the big picture aspect of disaster recovery. Before I started my new plant-based job, I was a senior Windows network administrator. We practiced disaster recovery preparation there, Server redundancy and backing up to alternate locations, etc.

As far as Acronis backup and bare-metal restore goes, I'm new to this particular software product so there are a lot of unknowns until I experience them. I'm just trying to use the combined knowledge here to jumpstart myself and avoid common pitfalls and oversights.

By best practices I mean limited as far as what you need to do when setting up and using Acronis to backup and restore in case you lose hard drives, etc. Last Fall we had exactly that happen, simultaneously losing 2 of the 5 hard drives making up a RAID5 array resulting in total loss of data. We had to send the Server to our plant application vendor because they said it was to complex for us to reload everything and configure it ourselves due to its highlt customized program coding linking out plant instrumentation to their databaseand control interface.

Unfortunately, before I came here there wasn't a plan to speak of because of certain budget contraints and false assumptions. I'm trying to change that.