In conjunction with the
design of a backup strategy, you must create and verify restore
procedures to ensure that appropriate personnel are knowledgeable in the
concepts and skills that are critical to data recovery.
Restoring with the Backup Utility
Restoring
data is a straightforward procedure. After opening the Backup Utility
and clicking the Restore And Manage Media tab as shown in Figure 1,
you will be able to select the backup set from which to restore.
Windows Server 2003 will then display the files and folders that the
backup set contains by examining the backup set’s catalog. You can then
select the specific files or folders you wish to restore. As with the
backup selection, a blue check mark indicates that a file or folder will
be fully restored. A dimmed check mark on a folder means that some, but
not all, of its contents will be restored.
You are also asked to specify the restore location. For this option, you have three choices:
Original location
Files and folders will be restored to the location from which they were
backed up. The original folder structure will be maintained or, if
folders were deleted, re-created.
Alternate location
Files and folders will be restored to a folder you designate in the
Alternate Location box. The original folder structure is preserved and
created beneath that folder, where the designated alternate location is
equivalent to the root (volume) of the backed up data. So, for example,
if you backed up a folder C:\Data\Finance and you restored the folder to
C:\Restore, you would find the Finance folder in
C:\Restore\Data\Finance.
Single folder
Files are restored to the folder you designate, but the folder
structure is not maintained. All files are restored to a single folder.
After selecting the
files to restore and the restore location, click Start Restore. Click OK
and the restore process will begin. Confirm that no errors occurred.
Restore Options
Windows Server 2003
supports several options for how files in the restore location are
handled during a restore. The following options are found in the Backup
Utility’s Tools–Options command, on the Restore tab shown in Figure 2:
Do Not Replace The File On My Computer.
This option, the default, causes the Restore utility to skip files that
are already in the target location. A common scenario leading to this
choice is one in which some, but not all, files have been deleted from
the restore location. This option will restore such missing files with
the backed-up files.
Replace The File On Disk Only If The File On Disk Is Older.
This option directs the restore process to overwrite existing files
unless those files are more recent than the files in the backup set. The
theory is that if a file in the target location is more recent than the
backed-up copy, it is possible that the newer file contains information
that you do not want to overwrite.
Always Replace The File On My Computer.
Under this restore option, all files are overwritten by their backed-up
versions, regardless of whether the file is more recent than the
backup. You will lose data in files that were modified since the backup
date. Any files in the target location that are not in the backup set will remain, however.
After selecting files to
restore, restore options and a restore destination, click Start Restore,
and then confirm the restore. The Start Restore dialog box appears.
Before
confirming the restore, you can configure how the restore operation
will treat security settings on the backed-up files by clicking Advanced
in the Confirm Restore dialog box and selecting the Restore Security
option. If data was backed up from, and is being restored to, an NTFS
volume, the default setting will restore permissions, audit settings,
and ownership information. Deselecting this option will restore the data
without its security descriptors, and all restored files will inherit
the permissions of the target restore volume or folder.
Practice: Restoring Data
In this practice, you will verify your backup and restore procedures using a common method: restoring to a test location.
Exercise 1: Verify Backup and Restore Procedures
To verify backup and
restore procedures, many administrators will perform a test restore of a
backup set. So as not to damage production data, that test restore is
targeted not at the original location of the data, but at another
folder, which can then be discarded following the test. In a production
environment, your verification should include restoring the backup to a
“standby” server, which would entail making sure that the backup device
(that is, the tape drive) is correctly installed on a server that can
host data in the event that the primary server fails. To do this,
perform the following steps:
1. | Open the Backup Utility.
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2. | Click Restore And Manage Media.
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3. | Click the plus sign to expand the file.
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4. | Click the plus sign to expand Backup-normal.bkf.
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5. | Click the check box to select C:.
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6. | Expand C:, Data, and Finance. You will notice that your selection of the C: folder has selected its child folders and files.
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7. | In the Restore Files To drop-down box, select Alternate Location.
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8. | In the Alternate Location field, type C:\TestRestore.
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9. | Click Start Restore.
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10. | In the Confirm Restore dialog box, click OK.
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11. | When the restore job is complete, click Report and examine the log of the restore operation.
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12. | Open the C:\TestRestore folder and verify that the folder structure and files restored correctly.
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13. | Repeat
steps 1 through 10, this time restoring the file backup-diff-day2.bkf.
When the restore job is finished, continue to step 14 to examine its
report.
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14. | When
the restore job finishes, click Report to view the restore job log. If
you accidentally close the job status window, choose the Report command
from the Tools menu, select the most recent report and click View.
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15. | Examine the report for the job you just restored. How many files were restored?
None.
Why?
The answer lies in the restore options.
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16. | Choose
the Options command from the Tools menu and click the Restore tab. Now
you can identify the problem. The default configuration of the backup
utility is that it does not replace files on the computer. Therefore,
the differential job, which contains files that were updated after the
normal backup, was not successfully restored.
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17. | Choose Always Replace The File On My Computer.
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18. | Repeat the restore operation of backup-diff-day2.bkf. The report should confirm that two files were restored.
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19. | You
have now verified your backup and restore procedures, including the
need to modify restore options. Delete the C:\TestRestore folder. |