Restore to virgin hard drives goes a lot faster than a backup. Often a
restore to new hard drives can take 50% less than the backup. You are
running backups every night already so backup time is not part of the
time equation.

Note of course that you do have to install two new hard drives, build
the new Raid 1 array, and install a base operating system that is on
the same service pack as your old backups. The big point is your
server should be running some sort of raid and preferably some sort of
hardware raid.

On Wed, 26 May 2010 12:06:50 +0100, Neil Rashbrook
<neil@newsgroup> wrote:

>Larry Struckmeyer[SBS-MVP] wrote:
>

>> The only Officially Supported way to do this in Server 2003, including
>> SBS 2003 is to backup, remove the old drive, install the new drive,
>> install a base OS, update the OS service pack to whatever was on the
>> box, and restore from backup.

>
>Yes, well given that the (local disk) backup itself takes over 50%
>longer than the clone, this is going to be the last resort option.

See what SBS support is working on
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/default.aspx
Check your SBS with the SBS Best Practices Analyzer
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive...A/default.aspx

Jim Behning SBS MVP wrote:

>Restore to virgin hard drives goes a lot faster than a backup. Often a restore to new hard drives can take 50% less than the backup. You are running backups every night already so backup time is not part of the time equation.
>

That assumes that files don't change between the backup and the restore,
which would presumably involve disconnecting the server from the
Internet to avoid incoming email etc.

>The big point is your server should be running some sort of raid and preferably some sort of hardware raid.
>

Sure; when I say disk I actually mean "RAID logical drive", but that
actually reduces flexibility, e.g. I can't choose which drive to boot
from, but with standalone drives I can just swap them around.