my client has a Win 2003 server with AD and Exchange running. He wants to have kinda a backup server which would be able to kick in if main one goes down. Is there any kind of software which would be able to make a copy of Windows 2003 with all data, software, etc and restore it back? I understand there is no problem with identical hardware, but if its different?

He has it already. Use ntbackup. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

Ntbackup won't failover a server. First thing you want to consider is clustering. Its expensive. You need a SAN that both servers connect to. You have to run Enterprise or better to get clustering in 2003. Next product to look at is server mirroring [google it to get the list of softwares] Next thought is server cloning. You need same hardware. You clone Serve A to Server B. You would have data loss from the time you did the clone to when you brought server b online [after taking server a offline] You should have a minumum of two AD server for AD failover. Alternately with DFS and FRS you can replicate data on both servers. One dies you change the DFS pointer and users have access to the data again. Are you ready for where Microsoft wants you to go today?

As I said here http://www.computing.net/windows200... , we've just deployed some msi packed apps after checking them with MSI testing tool from Scriptlogic. While I was browsing their site, they offer a lot of tools and it was very interesting for me as the person who's responsible for deployments and desktop management here to walk through descriptions there. As we also do backup states of our system and do it in a slightly obsolete way where the main problem is that all we have is hardware dependent (I mean that you have to have a similar hardware that allows using the same HAL with sysprep ghost setup ) RIS clone here I am also looking for the solution to deploy OSes to the desktops in a hardware abstracted manner. And I've seen there Scriptlogic also makes a tool that operates with images http://www.scriptlogic.com/products... and allows deploying them remotely. What I was amazed of is that this tool supports hardware abstraction and there's no need to keep different images. Also I've heard it's possible to do something similar with a new WIM image format http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/... but as far as I know it is restricted to Vista with WAIK and Windows Server 2008 which is currently in its beta stage. Old days we used ghosting but found it unreliable.

How about a mirror with a new internal HD. I have set both drives to dynamic as the directions list, but the add mirror option is not avaialable as the directions say it should be... what would cause this? Shawn From Graphicphreaks.com