System State Backups

There are a lot of changes happening in the backup industry as the space begins to move away from tape as the primary backup medium and starts using hard disks or network storage instead. Several vendors are now offering backup tools that rely on imaging technologies instead of file-based backups. I have started migrating many of my clients over to image-based backup tools, in fact.

But there’s still one thing that you really, really need to do when working with image backups – System State Backup. This is a special backup process that backs up Active Directory and other key server information such as the registry and other Windows configuration settings. I can’t count the times I’ve run across a situation that would have been easily resolved by restoring a system state backup. AD corruption, GPO corruption, etc. Sure, you could restore the entire C: image with your imaging tool, but then you lose any other data that was added to the drive following the backup.

But there are also some cases where an image-based backup fails to do its job. I spoke briefly with someone today who was having trouble because the image-based backup tool he was using was not correctly restoring the data to the system partition and the system was not bootable. He had gone around and around with the vendor of the backup software, and they could not get it to work. My first question to him was “do you have a system state backup?” Unfortunately, no. If he’d had a system state backup, he could have done a core install of the server OS, restored the system state, then gone into the backup software and done a file-based restore of the remaining contents of the system partition.

A system state backup can be captured very easily from ntbackup on a server, and can be saved to a file on local disk or on a share to another machine on the network. Either way, the backup file should be stored someplace that it can be easily accessed in case a restore is needed.