SBS2008 Bare Metal Recovery

Im looking for some advise. I work for a small company that runs SBS2008 as a server for user authentication and file shares and that is it.

I preformed a backup of the entire system to allow for a bare metal recovery in the case the server crash and burned. I was trying to test the recovery by restoring to a VirtualBox VM. Obviously the hardware is different, and after the restore, the VM continued to Blue Screen and reboot. So Im asking for advice on how I can test the backup, or ways to test recovery so I know if our server does die I can be back up in a short about of time.

Purchasing third party software is out of the question here. I know all about explaining to the powers that be, that the cost of being down for a length of time is far greater than the cost of a third party software to allow backup and recovery to different hardware. Still being approved to purchase software is denied.

So I am left with the tools at hand, The SBS2008 Disk, The Backup Made from inside SBS2008, and any free tools on the net. Can someone help me work through this so I can be sure I can recover my data? Putting files back where they were is easy enough for me, but Im talking about restoring all the users profiles, Active Directory, Group Policy, etc. If I cannot restore this to different hardware ( and this might be the case if the server hardware dies and wee need a new server) than I need to be able to reload all our settings. Help with this would be greatly appreciated. This is a new field for me and Im doing the best I can, but in the event of a system failure, Im afraid I am in the dark and I would rather not be.

Hi,

I would suggest have a spare set of identical replacement hard disk/ disks to hand & try the recovery to them.

That will at least prove the recovery system you have will work when needed. That is provided the recovery/ backup does not die with the system disk &/ or partition you are saving to! OK?

Thats all good if the actual server hardware itself doesn't die. Im trying to be ahead of that should the server it self fail. We could purchase an exact duplicate hardware, but if it dies in 5 years per say, I dont think going with old obsolete hardware would be good.

If this is windows based recovery works best on identical hardware otherwise you experience stability issues due to drivers and registry settings being incorrect.