Hello,
I’m configuring backups for a few VM Guests (Windows Server 2008 R2) with multiple hard disk drives. I accidentally “blew up” the Datastore/LUNs where these VM Guests reside by attempting a VMware Policy Type backup because there were disk drives that were larger than 2TB (our SANs, Datastores currently do not have the capacity to take a snapshot of a volume this large). We will be upgrading our SANs in the future to handle the snapshot capacity. I can create a VMware Policy Type and use the ‘Exclude all data disks’ attribute, but it will only take a snapshot of the C:\ drive (Operating System). The problem with this is the Applications are installed on the D:\ drive. After the C:\ (OS) and D:\ (\Program Files\, Applications), there are additional disk drives that have database components that we backup using different backup policies so we don’t need to worry about them.
My question is which of these two options is the best way to backup just the OS and Application installations?
- Create an MS-Windows Policy type and manually select the disk drives with the System_State attribute to mimic a “Full system backup?”
- Backup Selections = C:\, D:\, System_State
- Create an MS-Windows Policy type and select ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES, but configure exclusions to exclude specific disks that do not need to be backed up. We are currently not leveraging BMR (Bare Metal Restore).
- Backup Selections = ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES
- Then navigate to: NetBackup Management > Host Properties > Clients > [client] Properties > Windows Client > Exclude Lists: B:\, F:\, L:\ for this specific backup policy
Recovery scenario would be to build up a fresh VM Guest (same OS version, same NBU Agent version) and restore the C:\, D:\, and System_State. Then work with the application administrator/owner to restore the other content and databases.