In our completely over-engineered home network, we happen to be running Small Business Server to host our domain, email boxes, store "My Documents" for all user profiles, host some small websites, and run SharePoint. It's running very happily on my old dual-proc Pentium 3 500 machine, with its 512Mb ram and 27Gb hard drive - a machine that's been working very well for the past five or six years. Given that this machine is currently the life and soul of our home network, and given that it's quite old, I figured I could probably do with backing it up. Especially after hearing of Dave's recent problems (see here, here, and here), I was somewhat inspired. So, I thought I'd try out the built-in tool for SBS backup...
SBS is targetted at people running small businesses (like our company, Code Torque), who need office network infrastructure on a minimum of hardware, with a minimum of installation fuss. So, you'd think that the backup tool that comes supplied with SBS would actually be able to backup the operating system successfully. Well, you may think that, but having received several automated emails with the subject line "Windows Small Business Server Backup failed", I kinda figured that all was not as simple as it seemed.
Turns out that SBS backup is incapable of stopping essential services, leaving them all running, instead of shutting down stuff like SQL Server, so that a useful backup can be performed. Can anyone tell me what the point is of having a backup utility that doesn't actually back up any of the configuration of your system, any of your databases, SharePoint, Exchange account details ...? I mean, this is supposed to be a backup tool for a moderately-more-simple-to-use-than-individual-products server system. I'd be better off using a batch script on the command line and doing it all by hand.
More to the point, given that I'm not really much of an Exchange admin (yet), I'll have to spend time digging on Google for advice on how best to back up my system without spending any money on products that I'd rather not bother with buying if I can do it all myself, and waste valuable time in the process. It's pretty lame.