In my experience my system was back up and running in about 30 minutes. Restore times obviously depend on how much data is being restored. Here is the syntax I used to do a bare-metal restore:

\\\AIQRemote$\aiqRemote.exe restore volume -store -device \\\ -archive -path

Since my system drive was wiped I did not need to issue the -replace parameter, which gives you more options such as overwriting missing, charged, older or issue a force replace upon restore. There is also a type parameter for full, standard or quick restore types.

Hopefully it is as simple as that! If not you are faced with reinstalling the OS, NIC drivers and then utilize the Archive IQ utility to fully restore your data. (Whichever route you take be absolutely certain you are restoring this data to the exact piece of hardware that you backed it up from. Failure to do so will provide you with that lovely blue screen we refer to as the BSOD.)

Sometimes this process just wants to be difficult so If you have any boot errors on the machine you are restoring data on it’s possible you may have a different number of partitions on the disk so try editing the boot.ini file and simply change it to match the partitions number you restored to. If this does not alleviate the issue with booting into the OS insert your Windows installation disk and click your way through to the option to select ‘R’ for the recovery console. Once in the console and logged into a Windows installation, type in fixboot. This procedure will write a new boot sector on the system partition. Still not working properly? Well if everything to this point has failed you it is time to return to the console and attempt the ’fixmbr’ command. The fixmbr command is a recovery console command that writes a new master boot record to the hard disk drive that you specify.

Fixmbr Command Syntax: fixmbr (device_name)

Device name = This is where you designate the exact drive location that a master boot record will be written to. If no device is specified, the master boot record will be written to the primary boot drive.
A fixmbr command example would be: fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0

In the above example, the master boot record is written to the drive located at \Device\HardDisk0.

As I mentioned in a previous article I am in the process of evaluating Archive IQ to back up the data on our servers. Suddenly the lightbulb lit up! Why not utilize Archive IQ’s data deduplication technology to help streamline our migration process? This is exactly what we did which not only significantly cut the migration time itself but freed up a tremendous amout of disk space and as a added bonus, I was able to meet my deadlines with this project which always makes the big wigs happy.

As those in the business know your best source for a solution to a problem can often come from fellow engineers with other organizations and that is precisely the avenue I chose. Am I ever glad I did! After sending out some inquiries and having some discussions with some top notch administrators it was suggested to me that we should be taking a strong look at a backup/data protection system, Archive IQ. Trusting those offering up the advice I decided to give DSG’s Archive IQ a try as I really need to get this animal under control like sometime yesterday.

A simple 15 MB installation and we were up and running in just a few minutes. Outstanding! Archive IQ is a backup-to-disk de-duplication system which, in a nutshell, means you are not backing up every bit of data every time it runs. That’s right, “de-dupe” simply backs up the information that has changed since the last run compressing it down to about a 10:1 or so ratio. (I won’t argue with those claiming a 20:1 ratio as I am not familiar enough with the program to know for sure if this information is accurate.) Identifying and eliminating redundant blocks of data will reduce the amount of disk space needed significantly while dramatically speeding up the process thus saving bandwidth, which can be very useful when backing up across a WAN. Archive IQ utilizes VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to backup the system state, Exchange, SQL and any other application that supports VSS. Since de-duplication with Archive IQ takes place at the software level we are not tied to expensive hardware solutions, instead we can choose which disk vendor to do business with on the back end. Another advantage of being able to choose our own disk vendor, besides saving big money, is we can use the vendor’s replication technology to copy all data off of our in-house SAN/NAS to our disaster recovery site! Keep in mind the initial backup of the system will take some time for a few reasons. For example, all of the processing takes place on the client end which by it’s very nature will slow things down. Archive IQ must also lay down a base line copy prior to the system de-duplicating all future backups so depending on the amount of data involved this can really take up a chunk of time. It’s well worth it though when everything is in order and all future backups can be done in a fraction of the time it used to take and a fraction of storage too!

Of course one of my main concerns is restoring lost data and how well this program is going to work for me on that end. No worries at all folks! Finally, someone has done it the right way. What I mean by that is we now have simple drag and drop, point-in-line restore functionality. Archive IQ utilizes an interface that looks almost exactly like Windows Explorer and you simply drag and drop any files you wish to restore. I discovered the Windows Explorer looking interface is actually a front-end to the back end WebDav page so you have the ability to access the restore files within your web browser. Way cool indeed. Now, finally, I am truly a happy man.