Real Problems – Real Solutions - October 2001

Do you have a story to tell? Submit it to us and perhaps you can win a TechNet mug!

NTBACKUP is My Friend

By Alan Le Marquand I've been supporting a customer for a few weeks now. To drive their Jukebox drive system, the customer had purchased a Windows NT 3.51 server from the company I worked for. The customer had changed their mind about the configuration they wanted, and we had some interesting telephone conversations and site visits that were focused primarily on the distribution of the disks. The customer also had an Archserver backup system, and when the system was finally in the configuration they wanted, I did a complete backup of the system disk. I used NTBACKUP instead of their Archserver software, which surprised the customer somewhat at the time.

The system ran fine for about three weeks, at which point I received a phone call from the customer. They had lost the system disk and had called our hardware support person, who replaced the disk in accordance with the support contract. In trying to rebuild the machine, the customer was having problems remembering what went where and how to get all the data back on the other drives. This is not an unusual situation but the customer had been trying to do this for four days before calling us.

The result was that I had to go to the site and "fix it". Within two hours of my getting there, the customer saw the light as to why I had used the much maligned NTBACKUP. To get the system back, I did a very basic install of Windows NT making sure that the only component that was installed was NTBACKUP. Once installed, I performed a full restore using NTBACKUP, with the same tape I had created when I'd first backed up their system some three weeks earlier. The restore was performed on top of the system I had just created. It restored all of the config files and registry files such that when the system was rebooted everything came back--the settings, the software, the network, and most important, the data volumes and the Jukebox drive.

So the moral of this story is, don't dismiss NTBACKUP. It may just get you out of a jam.