Hay yall. I hope one day to be able to help as much as you have helped me. First I need to clone a C: Drive. I think it's going out. I have no idea which is the best way to clone a drive. I have used ghost to clone drive but not servers. Is there software package that we can use to backup the drive. Then if it goes out we can get the whole drive back and able to be a boot disk. I have used backup exec. I just never had to retrieve a lost server thank god... Second. I saw a server at a friend of mines work that has the following. 1. acted as the router 2. Acted as DNS 3. Acted as DHCP kind of the IP addresses were pre assigned. 4 and acted as a VPN server. also I did not see any virus or firewall. seems a bit odd to me to have a server do so much. I usually have a router (netopia) VPN enabled. and have the DNS and DHCP on the router that way the server is not doing everything. also this is the reason I was asking about the best way to back up a server to catastrophic backups, to get all the active director information back. His work server did not have a backup whatsoever. LOL Thank Michael

Is the server running a RAID array, or just a single disk? In the long run, it shouldn't matter and you should be able to make an image of it like you want using ghost or any one of the many other imaging software packages out there. Yes you could also use backup software. Windows has ntbackup built into it which is a little quirky, but once you understand it, works well enough. There are many other 3'd party packages available as well and google will help you find as many as you care to read about. I've use Computer Associates Brightstore ArcServ backup software and believe it to be one of the best on the market. However, if you have a small environment, there's no reason to go 3'd party and spend the extra $ when ntbackup will do the job for you nicely. Yep, servers can do that.....offer up network services like DNS, DHCP, RRAS/NAT etc etc. That's why they call them servers. ;) Likely he has a 3'd party software firewall running, or he's running MS's ISA server software if that's a Windows based server. ISA has firewall and VPN capability built into it. Not having a firewall or antivirus is asking for major trouble. Especially without backups! It's also worth mentioning that antispyware software like Ad Aware or Spybot S&D is worth having installed on your server. Run that once or twice a week as well to keep that crap to a minimum. Too much spyware can bog a PC/Server right down to a crawl and when it's that full of it, it can be near impossible to remove it all without redoing your system. Learn your lesson the easy way from your friend learning his the hard way.........backup backup BACKUP! Whatever backup solution you go with, test it to ensure you can reliably restore your backups. Also, if you're running a windows 2000/03 domain, a second DC can offer redundancy and is a good idea to consider.

Hardware Raid with minimal mirrored drives prevents server loss due to drive failure. MS says you should always have two servers with each containing dns and the global catalog for failover. Backups should always be done but you can't do a full system restore if the hardware has been replaced. My personal take is what you can do with hardware you should not do with a server. I would not use a server as a router unless I was doing something special with it [iis/web hosting/proxy/etc] The rest is pretty normal for a server. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

It is a single C: drive. not a raid. ALso if I can get my netopia router to run the DNS and the DHCP what is the benifits of the server doing these roles. I do know of all the roles a server can play I just question which piece of hardware should be doing what. Michael Houston

Oh also I guess in my mind some of the server OS cant be backed or cloned while the IS is running. OK say I have a HD go out. I have a backup from last night from ghost. Would I load the os then ghost then the backup and cross my fingers that when I reboot everthing is ok or would I put a new disk in and boot from the ghost CD and get the backups back and again cross my fingers and hope that my server boots and then sees all my server roles in place. The reason I ask is that in my old job we did not run active directory or domain contollers we had routers that built the network.so if a server whent down I could rfix it reload the os and replace the software then pull then files off backup. I have never had to deal with backing up the OS and / or any server roles. Any help will be appreciated. This is a project for the future Im just collecting information. I do need to clone that drive though. Michael

Bummer...a single disk. If you don't mind me asking, what type of server is this? (ie: make/model) If you can, I would definately go with RAID and redundant DC's like Wanderer mentioned. If not, then you'll have to deal with what you have. ALso if I can get my netopia router to run the DNS and the DHCP what is the benifits of the server doing these roles If this is an Active Directory integraded Windows domain, you will want DNS running on your DC. Clients need to contact the DC to be authorized at login and if you mess up the DNS, they won't be able to. A typical setup is clients point to the DC for DNS. The DNS service on the DC is forwarded to your ISP's DNS servers to handle requests outside the local zone. I do know of all the roles a server can play I just question which piece of hardware should be doing what. Ideally, you want to reduce the load on a server (DC) as much as possible so moving things like DHCP onto your router isn't a bad idea necessarily. Basically, it depends on what you want to do and what works best for you. Oh also I guess in my mind some of the server OS cant be backed or cloned while the IS is running. Correct. When using ghost, you boot with a bootdisk that has ghost on it. You run ghost once booted and clone the drive. You then put the image on your backup media. In the case of a hard drive failure you replace the drive, boot with the ghost bootdisk, clone the image onto the drive, remove your bootdisk and boot to the OS. NOTE: you could also make this a bootable CD or DVD and boot directly to it. Here's the thing about the image process. When backing up the entire drive (or drives), you end up with a VERY large backup. Depending on the amount of data we're talking multiple DVD's. If you use backup software like the native Windows ntbackup, you backup the system state and only the important data giving you a smaller backup. With this scenario, in the case of a failed HDD, you replace the HDD, install/update the OS and then restore your most recent backup. Back to RAID. Let's say you're running RAID 1 for the OS and RAID 5 for the data. If an HDD fails, the system alerts you. You then replace the defunct drive and the RAID rebuilds and life continues with no downtime. This is a LOT better solution than a single disk setup and the amount of downtime necessary to do either process I mentioned above.

It's a Generic made home computer running server software. ROFL Michael