Hi
I'm looking for advice on testing backups.
I have an SBS2011 server (well will do in 2 days) The configuration will be Raid1 600GB and Raid1 1TB (ignore opinions on raid configuration etc, please.)
This will be backed up to an external USB drive.
I suspect as like the SBS2008 system the backup will report as successful (as less data will be on there to be backed up and less total capacity)
However I'd like to put into place a regular test of the backups. Now I know I can test individual file restores from the backup/restore console easily. Which I would hope is a good inidication of the backup being successful, as I believe the backup is image based, so if one file extracts the image should not be corrupted.
However to doubly make sure of things I'd like to test worse case scenario of multiple HDD failure and having to restore all the data (also so i know what to do if that ever happens)
Do I just need to get a basic PC with 2 HDD's in it 1 over 600GB and the other over 1TB? obviously I don;t want to buy a duplicate of a £3k server. Mind you even just building a £300 pc for the occasional test is expensive.
What do you do? How do you test? What about restoring to a Virtual Machine with 2 VHD files? from Virtual Box or VMware ESXi or HyperV?
any advice, experiences, would be happily received
Tris