Hi All,
On Tuesday, I think we performed a world’s first operation on our test environments… a bare metal restore from a backup on iSCSI target, from the Windows Recovery Environment.
The problem is that the WinRE (that you get by booting off the Windows installation DVD on Windows Vista and onwards) does not include the iSCSI Initiator. However, we have been experimenting with our own recovery environment that does include the iSCSI Initiator… and we managed to get it to work! Needless to say, we had a small crowd around our test machine when I “clicked the button” to start the restore… we held our breaths (for around 10 minutes) while the restore took place, and there were high fives when the machine booted back up again.
This feature is still in “proof of concept” stage, so it’s many months away from being included in the main BackupAssist release. However, I thought I’d blog about it, because I’m pretty confident that this is the first time anyone has done a bare metal restore from the Windows RE from an iSCSI target. And it could unlock a new way of performing backups and recoveries.
Woo hoo!
Linus
4 thoughts on “Windows Server Backup – Bare metal restore off iSCSI”
Great news Linus! I’ve been chatting to Aaron about this for ages so it’s great to see that you’re making some progress on this as it will certainly streamline the way we can perform backups and also gives more options when backing up Hyper-V Hosts & Guests as iSCSI Targets will happily pass through.
Hi,
i work as a IT consultant, I usually install Backuassist on my customer’s servers. it would be possible to try this feature as a beta tester? I’d really like to have that kind of choice when doing a bare metal restore because many of my cistomer’s backup on a NAS (or SAN) through an iSCSi connection.
Well done, bring it on Linus.
I am sure the community is ready for this and it will be well received.
Thanks David!