Unity 3.0 Backup

[gcossins]

I am using Unity 3.0(3) with Exch off Server and require to backup the server. The server is an NT4 member server and therefore holds no user accounts. I have 'ghosted' the Unity partition so I can quickly restore to that point in time. Now I want to shedule a script to copy both SQL and Commserver directories to a network share each night. To do so will require stopping SQL and Unity services, copying the directories and then restarting the services. Therefore I intend to net stop sql and all the AV* entries in control panel, after which i will use the restart tool to re-boot the server. <br><br>In case of a failure, the aim is to a) restore from the 'ghost' image, stop the services, copy sql & commserver dirs over, then reboot to hopefully working system.<br><br>Do you see any problems? is there anything that gets written to the registry on a regular basis that i need to be aware of?<br><br>thanks in advance<br><br>Geoff<br><br><br>

[#2]

Yes, there are a number of things Unity writes to local files and the registry in 3.0(x) that will cause you problems here. Aside from that this process is not supported by TAC at all so if you have a problem, you're really on your own.

I'm intimately familiar with these issues as I've just released the Disaster Recovery Tools (DiRT) to AnswerMonkey about an hour ago. This tool does exactly what you want without having to take Unity down. It backs up the SQL tables, registry settings, local files, greetings, voice names etc... and drops them into a shared network drive you select. It can be schedule to run nightly or whatever. The compansion Restore tool pulls everything back into a clean install of Unity of the same version that was backed up.

It does a lot of other things outside of what you'd want to use it for (i.e. you can restore to a different server name, domain, install with a different Exchange backend configuration etc.. and the restore will adjust on the fly).

The bad news for you is it only works on 3.1(1) and later due to some synchronization problems with SQL and the directory that were exposed in 3.0(x) versions. The Syncher version that ships with 3.1(x) solved those issues.

This will be a TAC supported tool after the release of Unity 3.1(3) and it'll be supported on 3.1(1) or later. If you can, I'd reccomend getting to 3.1(x) and going that route for this.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)