I'm setting up a Windows Server 2003 for my network. The server has two harddisks, the first will hold the system as well as a data partition, the second should have a copy of the data partition. Is there a tool which can automatically backup all data from the data partition to my backup partition?
The computer does not have RAID and the harddrives do not have the same capacity, but both data partition and backup partition are exactly the same size.
Best Regards
Oliver Hanappi
PS: It would be nice if the software is free or even Windows built in (I'm on a low budget).
I'd recommend an external (USB) disk to hold the copy of data, simply because if your server fails you'll find it easier to restore to a new box. Backup and restore are about more than just individual files, after all.
I'm not sure that something like NTBackup is what you're asking about, and I get the impression that what you're really after is a way to get back files that have been overwritten or deleted by accident (although you should also consider a proper full backup too). NTBackup comes with Windows and is great for basic backup and restore, but won't be as convenient as copy and paste for getting individual files back.
I'd suggest a 2 layered approach. Look at the Volume Shadow Copy "previous versions" feature to get your individual files back easier (configure it to store the previous versions on the 2nd disk maybe): plenty of info on that in the Windows help files. Then use NTBackup to take a full backup of everything (including OS, programs, etc) to the USB disk. Full backups once a week, differentials once a night and you should be good.
If you're talking about backup, then you can use the built-in NTBackup tool. You can schedule jobs to run automatically (via 'Scheduled Tasks'). If you're not taking the data offline or off-site, though, it's not a real backup. Assuming you're just playing around at home with unimportant data, though, it's a fine training exercise.
If this is going to be "serious" data, you should look at using Windows software RAID and purchasing one or more external disks to use as destinations for backups. RAID, of course, is not backup, but rather is a fault tolerance mechanism. Since you already have multiple internal hard disk drives in the computer you can use Windows software RAID (at no additional expense) to get protection from disk failure for both the operating system and the data. Then, you can use one or more external disks to create backups that you can take offline and off-site.
Simple .bat script and scheduler will mostly do the job.
Also, as you said that you don't have RAID installed, you can try Software Raid on Windows, which, of course, is NOT a back up solution, but a way to increase reliability.