WOW. I just learned that The Planet support techs QUOTE "do not perform migrations nor do we perform backups and restores so we do not have any real world experience to draw from".

That was the response I received when asking about the general process for restoring my server from DiskSync in the event of a system failure or server hack.

Okay... so it's nice to finally know they've been taking my money each month for a backup system from which they they have never performed a restore.

Tech Support referred me to these forums for assistance. So, does anyone have any experience restoring from DiskSync? I'd prefer experiences regarding the entire server, but I'll take any scraps of DiskSync restore advice anyone may have.

Will DiskSync do a bare metal restore, or would I have to restore on top of an entire OS? Should I rely on DiskSync as a data backup only & have a different plan for an entire server restore?

Thanks so much,
Matt

Hello Matt,

Disksync will not do a bare metal restore, but CDP backup will. In fact CDP offers a "Live Boot" option, which allows you to reboot into a Knoppix livecd-like environment without a CD. As with most backup software, you'll want to make sure you are restoring to similar hardware when doing a bare metal restore.

Disksync creates backups at the block level, whereas CDP uses the whole block device. This allows CDP to re-create a block device as it was. Disksync is only able to restore at the file level, so the partitions will not necessarily be as they were after a restore. Because of that, attempting a bare metal restore with Disksync can work for a linux server if done correctly (not recommended however), but not for a windows server.

I hope that helps!

Thanks for your quick response, Mike! I thought the forum would send me an e-mail when a response was posted, but I guess I didn't check the right box for that. (Actually, it says I'm currently receiving e-mail notification of replies, but I'm not. I'll have to check into that further...)

I'll check out CDP, but is that a service that The Planet offers, or is it just some separate software I need to invest in?

It sounds to me that I maybe need to keep with my DiskSync, now knowing it's for files only, and just have in place a plan that involves a complete wipe/reformat with migration of cPanel accounts using cPanel's own backup/restore method.

Any other thoughts that come to mind?

Thanks again,
Matt

We offer CDP packages:
http://www.theplanet.com/dedicated-servers...Soft-CDP-Server

I'm not quite the expert that Michael is, but I have used the CDP a bit internally and have been very impressed with it's functionality and ease of use. The bare metal restore functionality is fairly easy to use and has proven to be quick.

Restoration in a production environment is frighteningly easy to do.