You are an Enterprise administrator for contoso.com. All the servers in the domain run Windows Server 2008 and all client computers run Windows Vista.
The network contains 3 servers, a file server, a database server, and a messaging server. You have been assigned the task to provide a backup infrastructure to create consistent backups of open files and applications, database server, and the messaging server.
The solution must also be able to minimize the interruption to applications. Which of the following options would you choose to accomplish the desired task?
A.
Use Windows Server Backup to perform a daily backup to an external disk.
B.
Use Windows Server Backup to perform a daily backup to a remote network share.
C.
Enable volume shadow copy service for the volumes that needs to be backed up.
D.
Enable shadow copies for the volumes that contain shared user data.
E.
None of the above
Explanation:
To create consistent backups of open files and applications, database server, and the messaging server without interrupting the applications, you need to enable shadow copies for the volumes that need to be backed up.
Applications that are running often keep their files open continuously. For backup, this can present a problem because this prevents backup applications from accessing and copying these files to backup media. Additionally, backing up servers that are running critical applications such as databases or messaging services presents a unique challenge. These applications run in a volatile state as a result of extensive optimizations that deal with huge flows of transactions and messages.
Because these applications keep their data in a constant flux between memory and disk, it is difficult to pinpoint the data that needs to be archived. The most straightforward solution is to interrupt the application during backup, which puts the data into a stable state, but might result in unacceptable amounts of downtime, particularly if the applications are large.
For both problems, the Volume Shadow Copy Service provides a solution by enabling a snapshot of the data at a given point in time, while minimizing the interruption to applications.