The newer backup methodology is based on taking an image of your server vs. backing up files at the file level. Let’s take a quick look at this. A file based backup will back up the file, for example, the Word or Excel file. So, when it is time to restore, you can simply restore that specific file. An image based backup, backs up the entire hard drive underneath the file level, giving you two restore options. First, you can access the image and still restore a single Word or Excel file. Second, you can restore the entire computer in the exact state it was in at the time of the backup. Let’s expand on this a bit.

If your server or computer becomes corrupted, and is not able to boot up, and you have a file level backup, the process will start with re-installing the server or computer’s operating system. Then you will have to try to get all the configurations as close to the way they were before the corruption, and then restore the data (Word, Excel files, etc.) On a computer this may not be that cumbersome, but on a server it may be a whole different ball game. With an image based backup, if the system is corrupted and won’t boot, you boot to the image software and restore your server, in its entirety, to the date of the image backup.

As you can see, the image based backup does have significant advantages. Image based backups became the standard from Microsoft beginning with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. We like them and we recommend them.

Our next post will discuss image based backup software.