I just discovered it today, talk about shocked, I have multiple sites with
$000's tied up in tape based backup solutions. Considering teh crazy prices
of some the third party solutions, I'm amazed that MS would drop such a
fundamental part of SBS.

Whats everyone elses reaction ? Last time I checked USB 2.0 drives sucked
compared to SCSI ultra transfer speeds. Then I found out the 2008 backup
doesn't even support exchange ?! SO SBS 2008 basically REQUIRES a 3rd party
solution for backups ! I hope MS doesn't stop supply of SBS 2003 anytime
soon, cause theres no way 1/2 my customers will want a solution with less
features. It's XP to Vista migration all over again. (Vista backup sucks
also BTW)

I have mixed feelings about this personally. I figure SBS 2k8 will *not* be
going on any current hardware...or at least hardware that wasn't pre-spec'd
for 2k8 as of this summer. So new machines will can have new 2k8 backup
devices purchased with them, such as removable drive-bay drives or
cartridge-based backups (Rev drive, etc)....not a big deal. Older machines
will be retired because they are out of warranty (and I *hate* a server
being out of warranty!)

Larger, more expensive backup solutions such as tape autoloaders already
*have* 3rd party software to drive them...so again, not a significant loss.
As far as SCSI vs USB, for tapes the transfer speed is still decidedly
bottlenecked at the speed the drive can feed the tape from one spindle to
the other, which is always well below the theoretical max of either
protocol.

The downside is that tape isn't going to be a legitimate option anymore for
many scenarios. Some of my clients needs large storage requirements AND
data retention...grandfather/father/son type backup scenarios. That is
obviously a boatload of external hard drives sitting unused in a vault
somewhere. And cartridge solutions just aren't big enough. I'd normall
spec an LTO drive or somesuch here, which I suppose I'll still do, but now
the price will have to include a more expensive backup program as well. So
yeah, that part kinda sucks.

All in all, I think MS probably pulled the rip-cord on tapes a little too
soon...but Mac kicked the 3.5" drive to the curb too soon as well, and they
managed to survive it and the industry came around. I suspect the same will
happen, and manufacturers will step up to fill the void.

-Cliff

"Aart Jansen" <aart> wrote in message
news:756f
[..]

"Aart Jansen" <aart> wrote in message
news:756f
>I just discovered it today, talk about shocked, I have multiple sites with
>$000's tied up in tape based backup solutions. Considering teh crazy prices
>of some the third party solutions, I'm amazed that MS would drop such a
>fundamental part of SBS.
>
> Whats everyone elses reaction ? Last time I checked USB 2.0 drives sucked
> compared to SCSI ultra transfer speeds. Then I found out the 2008 backup
> doesn't even support exchange ?! SO SBS 2008 basically REQUIRES a 3rd
> party solution for backups ! I hope MS doesn't stop supply of SBS 2003
> anytime soon, cause theres no way 1/2 my customers will want a solution
> with less features. It's XP to Vista migration all over again. (Vista
> backup sucks also BTW)


The SBS backup backs up Exchange.

http://www.sbstraining.net/post/2008...rver-2008.aspx

If you use the SBS backup speed isn't really a problem unless you have a lot
of constantly changing data. Each backup drive only has one full backup then
incrementals. If speed is a problem I'd use eSata.

FWIW I wish tape support was still included but as Server 2008 no longer has
built in tape support the SBS team would have had to develop their own
solution.

This not really news Aart. It's been blogged by several SBS folks and brought up here as well probably over a year ago. And just to be clear...it is not a thing the SBS folks took out but rather the fact that the Server 2008 folks decided to pull this. It's core to the server operating system, there would be no way for the SBS folks to add that back in.

But as Kerry mentioned, they were able to add back in the support for backing up Exchange.

I'm not disappointed. I had a customer, rather than call me, rip the face of his tape drive off when a tape wouldn't eject. Tape drive rendered "useless". And there is no restriction from 3rd party programs and tape. But yes, BE for SBS with 3 year maintenace will be about 1,000.

It certainly has been less expensive for my customers, even though it required some education and reacclimation, to go with USB drives...and I don't have to worry about a tape getting mangled, etc.

If you have any doubts about SBS 2008 backup, I'd urge you to stand up an
RC1 server and try it out. It's really awesome - I would even say
revolutionary.

For those who really want to continue with tape, I'm sure there will be many
3rd party solutions that work. There are some companies that I'd expect to
offer really good products at reasonable cost - Backup Assist comes right to
mind, although I'm not sure what they plan for Server 2008 and/or SBS.

If you want to try SBS backup, you can get the RC from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en.
The page refers to RC0, but if you continue through to the download page,
it'll offer you RC1.


"Aart Jansen" <aart> wrote in message
news:756f
[..]

Aart,

With all due respect, tape is history. Horse and buggy analogy comes to
mind. The rules are changing and it's not that same old "tape is fast and
more reliable than USB drives", there's a total paradigm shift here.

Tape is a linear recording format that is based upon recording file by file
everything you specify file by file. To record or restore the tape format
requires linear thinking, linear media, linear capacity...and we didn't even
get to the cost of the devices yet.

What SBS is doing is what the world is moving to: block based backup.

You may have heard of these cool concepts in Drive Imaging: Incredibly fast
transfer because it only transfer real data drive to drive and compresses it
along the way. Well, drive imaging has been based upon block based backup
for a decade, and now we are seeing intelligent use of block based storage
for backup: Non-linear backups.

The transfer speed discussion is totally blown out of the water, as is the
storage capacity and recovery issues. The backup cycle
requirements...totally redefined.

Here's the scoop.

Block based backup records the contents of a drive/partition/volume by
recording the "blocks" (a fixed size storage unit on a drive device,
typically 4K in size) and storing them in the backup to disk based "backup
file" in essentially the same what the content was stored on the hard drive
in the first place. The blocks of data are stored with an index of the
blocks as they relate to discrete files. This part if baseline information
to understand the next part.

When a backup of a machine is performed with any historically based file by
file backup, the media (tape or drive) would record the entire content of
whatever files you requested. That means that if you have an AutoCAD file
that is 100 MB in size, the smallest increment of backup you can do to store
that file if it just changed is: 100 MB. You store the entire file. The next
day someone modifies the file again and you must again store the entire 100
MB file (or whatever that size is now).

With that idea in mind, what if the only change to the file was a correction
of a small area of text? If you look at the entire file, out of the 100 MB
file only a couple of 4K blocks of information actually would be updated.
That means that 99.9% of the file was unchanged, a linear backup of the
entire file therefore moved 99.9 MB of information you already have stored
the previous day just to record the 2-3 blocks of 4K size each that were
modified.

Now, scale that idea up to an entire hard drive or array or server full of
files and you find out that 95% of what is on any server never changes day
to day, but to do a linear backup of that drive/array/server you must record
the entire file because that's the paradigm you are using with -tape-
backups.

The way that block based backups work you only have to record the individual
blocks that changed, not the entire size of all files that changed. That's a
basic difference in a "differential backup"" at the block level versus a
"differential backup" at the file level. At the file level you would record
everything, the entire file that is marked as changed even if 99% of the
blocks involved are identical data.

Suppose you have an 1,000 G storage capacity on your server and you want to
do a fully recoverable backup every night using tape. That means you need a
tape drive (I believe we are talking a library of tapes with an autochanger
here) to recover at tape speed the entire occupied capacity of 1000G each
night. That creates a huge backup time window requirement even if you have a
240-300 Mb/m transfer rate. You likely have a $7000-10000 backup investment
there.

Alternatively, if you have a trio of 1,000 G drives, you probably can backup
the first "baseline" content in about the same time, and I would hope you
are using E-Sata in this example, not USB2, but it doesn't matter to much.
The following night, you can now make a backup of only the differential
blocks that changed, that's perhaps 10 G of changes which would backup at
block level in about 15 minutes. See the difference?

This logic does suggest that you would want to rotate your target drives so
that you can have the backup's on more than one physical drive (in case your
backup device fails, you want more than one).

But if you take that logic and extend it, you can now look at the idea of
taking a complete backup of a 1000G drive in under an hour every night,
cycle the media so that you have a baseline on each drive plus whatever
changes. Now you have a dramatically faster backup concept nightly, and you
get another benefit.

Take a look at those backup incrementals at the block level and you could
potentially now keep track of incremental backups for several weeks all on
one drive if you only record the block changes, and keep the baseline
separated on a different drive of which you have multiple copies including
off site. Now you have extend that over a period of a month and have the
ability to restore to any day in the last month with every change recorded
on 1 DRIVE of probably less than 500 G in size....that costs $150.

Scale that math out and you will see that tape drive ceases to be
interesting because you can now also transfer these same differentials to
remote locations over the Internet because the changes are small enough to
address over the wire in many cases. If not, you fall back upon the physical
move offsite, but hopefully the point of this is understood.

Finally, to blow the doors off the entire discussion, if you look at a block
level on every workstation in an office you would likely find that perhaps
60% or more of all blocks on all workstations have something in common: they
repeat machine to machine. That's because when Windows records the files it
always starts each individual file at the beginning of a block, and leaves
the gap at the end of the last block empty once there's no more file bytes
to write. For any workstation environment where most of the data is stored
on the servers, this means a significant portion of what is on the local
workstation drive is just files for the OS and applications....and they will
be identical across each machine.

What this means is that when looking at the block level across many machines
in a common organization, you could do a block level backup of every machine
and only record the unique blocks, no need to save identical block contents
if that block occurs on more than one machine.

If you would like to see how this concepts evolves, take a look at Windows
Home Server and how it can backup every machine it's connected to and store
a full recovery backup of 10 machines in less disk space than any 2 machines
use. This is because the unique blocks can be indexed not only for each
individual drive or partition on one machine, you can make a summary index
of every machine in the network.

Take that concept to the domain level and it becomes possible to record
immense amounts of system files and data for an entire network in a smaller
amount of space than before to just get the baseline, but the time saving to
do the incremental backup the following night are almost unbelievable. You
might find you could backup an entire 20 node network in 1 hr or less,
including the server.

SBS features for Client Backup did not make the release schedule for SBS
2008, but the proof of the technology to do it is right there in Windows
Home Server.

None of this is possible with Tape backups because it's impractical with the
linear nature of tape. You can't randomly scan or pull back individual files
(blocks) or record individual file (block) changes without moving linearly
through the tape. Not only that, but physical drives (forget if it's USB,
E-SATA, SCSI, whatever interface) are getting so cheap that it's less
expensive than the tape media, much less the drive to get the capacity you
need.

It's becoming practical to build a data backup array in addition to your
drive storage array, then periodically pull a "copy of the backup" off the
backup array to put it onto a single external drive to move off site or by
virtual transfer over the wire to a different site location.

Hopefully this rough explanation can help you see that your tape based
backup is still as good as it ever was and you can continue to use it with
3rd party applications to drive it if you wish, but you can't compete in a
stick-fight with a the other guy using a machine-gun.

Tape drives are dead for anything other than specialty case work where the
media offers some sort of advantage....but in general, this is really
comparing horse and buggy to flight by jet.

- Jeff Middleton
SBS-MVP

SBSmigration.com

"Kerry Brown" <kerry*a*m> wrote in message
news:2064
[..]

Jeff, it's been way too long since you last published one of your famous
treatises here. Good to see you : -)


"Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP]" <jeff> wrote in message
news:1236
[..]

there's a problem with that 100MB file though. You see, I changed a text
string held at the beginning of the file from 5 to 6 chars. This has caused
every 4K block in the file to be moved down 1 byte. As far as this magical
'block level backup' is concerned the whole file has changed.


"Jeff Middleton [SBS-MVP]" <jeff> wrote in message
news:1236
[..]

In article <#jgYFFq7IHA.1236>,
jeff says...
> What SBS is doing is what the world is moving to: block based backup.

And if I backup the entire server how doe block save me space or time
over anything else?

Leythos wrote:
> In article <#jgYFFq7IHA.1236>,
> jeff says...
>> What SBS is doing is what the world is moving to: block based backup.
>
> And if I backup the entire server how doe block save me space or time
> over anything else?
>
First time no.
Second time, yes.

despite my (possibly ill conceived) desire to point out flaws in 'block
based backup' I actually think it's a good thing. I just don't see why the
introduction of this need coincide with the death of my beloved tape. I also
do not see much relevence in connecting the two events.

IMHO MS have stopped NTBackup supporting tape mainly in order to no longer
pay royalties to the party they licensed the technology off. This is _more
than somewhat_ offset by the fact that 'end users' themselves have also
moved away from using tape (an idea I think is NUTS).

This 'block based backup' thing is great, as users of Windows Home Server
quickly appreciate (my semi-tech sister being part of this group). Thing is,
I then want to backup Helen's whole WHS (including the block based
workstation backups) to tape. The fact that WHS holds not only its own
information but various backup points of Helen's few PCs makes this _even
more desirable_.

SBS 2008 has this 'block based backup' for the server. I believe that many
people who are aware of WHS ability to use the same technology for
workstations have requested that SBSBackup be extended to include this
ability. It doesn't seem like it would be a hard thing to do (IMHO).

Gonna be a hard sell for me though:
Yes, you have 50GB of data. However, due to this 'Enterprise Block Based
Backup' thing we need 400GB of RAID storage, and a tape drive, and software.

"Leythos" <void> wrote in message
news:2440
[..]

1.) Tape IS supported. Just not by any of the native backup solutions
shipped with SBS. So if you have a third party solution, the tape "pieces"
are still in Server 2008. Your third party solutions should still work.

2.) There IS no NTBackup. It's a completely new program. NTBackup is dead
and gone.

Tape backup isn't gone. It's just not any longer used by SBS, nor is it
available with native Windows tools. But if you have a third party backup
solution, the tape bits are still in the OS to support it.

Yes NTBackup is Dead as far a standard
But if you want you can Still Download NTBackup from here
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

And use the tapes, (If you choose)

I'm personally Happy that Tape is finally gone
and the POP3 Connector...

Time to move forward :)

Russ

Oh, I agree. Tape has caused me more failed restores than I care to think
about.

The NTBackup you can download is only for restore, I believe. I don't think
it will do backups.