Cloning your network environment has become main stream! Hooray! Wait, what does that mean? Well, there’s file recovery that comes with backup software. This is essential for bouncing back from the brink of disaster. Not only is the file recovery important but the amount time that it takes your business to be back up and running. Most businesses can’t afford to have a computer on standby and the computer still requires customization if they do. So here’s the downside or the unfortunate turn of events that will play out when disaster strikes and your computer does not compute.
- One hour to troubleshoot plus time to replace the hard drive if it is a hard drive issue
- One hour to install the Windows OS in good working order
- At least two hours, closer to three to customize with business applications such as browsers, Reader, Office, and additional third party apps like CAD. Not to mention mapped drives and the data recovery itself.
Some of these talking points can be expedited the more fancy of a network you have. Ultimately, the best solution is to find an affordable and easy to use imaging system to apply incremental backups or snapshots of the entire operating system, application, and drives. Perhaps, I should introduce Veeam. IT’s golden child…
Veeam Image Disaster – Recovery Process
- The software itself is very easy to install just make sure you make the recovery media on a USB stick to recover from whatever disaster occurs with your computer.
- Recovery Media -The Veeam Recovery Media just takes the basic hardware drivers from the machine. And then uses them after it gets booted to the recovery media. Now it shouldn’t distort any current hard drive setup of the machine itself. But if there are any drivers being used that are specific to said hard drive setup, then it could cause issues if the recovery media is being used on a machine in which said drivers are not compatible. Otherwise, any generic hardware drivers being used should have no other issues on different machines.
Utilizing Veeam Recovery Media
The tricky part comes when you are performing a “bare metal recovery” I got a little hung up in a solid state drive replacement. I wanted to make sure the old C volume is restored to the new C volume. The Veeam mapping used in the recovery media completely threw me off. Here’s the system setup prior to recover:
C: Disk 0 125GB SSD
D: Disk 1 250GB SSD
E: Disk 3 1 TB SATA
Here’s the hardware setup after:
C: replaced with 250GB SATA
c: Disk 0 250 SSD
E: Disk 1 TB SATA
Veeam – Disk Mapping (yes, I’m aware of the crummy pictures. I will fix that later)
It’s important to customize disk mapping by clicking in the right hand corner because the default setup does not make since
As discussed before, the 250 gig is planned to be the C drive replaced for the old 125 gig failed drive. I clicked “apply disk layout” and pointed it to disk 0 for the migration of the old C drive to the new C drive. Below is the more ideal disk mapping layout. Even though it doesn’t show it, I expanded the C drive from 125 gig to 250 gig. The duration of the image migration took five minutes. A wee bit shorter time than a complete reinstall of the OS. 
Veeam has their own documentation that can assist you in the recovery process. It unfortunately fell short of me understanding some critical features that could potentially eliminate important data on the other drive.
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