Windows Server 2019

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ImageIsEverything
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:16 pm

Windows Server 2019

Post by ImageIsEverything »

Hi.

I have a brand new Windows Server 2019 machine for use in a small office.

I would like to create occasional (a few a year) image snapshots for disaster recovery.

Note, data backup is handled separately, backed-up daily locally and to cloud. I am concerned here only with the OS drive, which happens to be a 1 TB NVMe SSD (no RAID).

a) Do TBU products fully support Windows Server 2019? Website states only "Server 2016, etc".

b) Which products would you recommend? My understanding is that Image for Linux would require booting to Linux, whereas Image for Windows runs within the Server OS itself so should be much easier to use. But is Image for Windows as reliable for disaster recovery if my 1 TB NVMe drive fails and needs to be replaced? Maybe my concerns are unfounded, but my instinct suggests an image created while the system is running can't possibly be as good as one created outside of the OS while not running.

Thank you in advance for any advice!
Bob Coleman
Posts: 785
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 5:58 pm

Re: Windows Server 2019

Post by Bob Coleman »

ImageIsEverything wrote:

> a) Do TBU products fully support Windows Server 2019? Website states only
> "Server 2016, etc".
>
> b) Which products would you recommend? My understanding is that Image for
> Linux would require booting to Linux, whereas Image for Windows runs within
> the Server OS itself so should be much easier to use. But is Image for
> Windows as reliable for disaster recovery if my 1 TB NVMe drive fails and
> needs to be replaced? Maybe my concerns are unfounded, but my instinct
> suggests an image created while the system is running can't possibly be as
> good as one created outside of the OS while not running.

I have experience with Windows 10 and its predecessors only. No Windows Server.

It's probably technically true that using IFL requires booting to Linux, but you create IFL boot media, typically on USB flash drives these days. Booting that drive does boot some version of Linux but you don't need any other Linux installed to boot from.

I understand your instinct. I felt the same way for a long time, but finally made the jump to creating backups of the running system with IFW years ago. So far, I've never had an issue restoring any image made this way. Again, no Windows Server involved.

I normally back up my Windows system partition (and others) daily, so running IFW from Windows is much more convenient that booting IFL. Maybe you wouldn't mind booting IFL a few times a year. On the other hand maybe it's important to you to not have any down time on the server. No way for me to judge that.
echan101
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:51 pm

Re: Windows Server 2019

Post by echan101 »

Generally you do need to use a bootable USB to be 100% sure. I'd suggest you can create a TBWINRE bootable USB from IFW. There is an option to "include Windows drivers" which is important to tick - because this includes all the drivers including storage drivers (if you did use RAID it would include those drivers). TBWINRE is a full Windows recovery environment created from your specific version of Windows so it will be the most compatible, and it will understand all the hardware and partitions that you have. I've been doing it this way with no problems.

That being said Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making its drive snapshots much better, so using an installed version of IFW should be fine (esp. since Win10 is based on Win2019) even if the server contains databases.
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