Recovery ISO and Hyper-V config report as backup jobs

[corblimey]

I like to create a Recovery ISO from the OS and keep on the system somewhere. When I run the daily backups I include a simple replication job to copy the recovery ISO to the backup disk.

This means that I always have everything I need on the backup backup media should I ever have to do a bare metal restore. The only downside is I have to manually recreate the ISO if there have been system changes (eg new hardware or driver updates, etc).

It would be great if I could simply add the recovery iso build as a normal scheduled backup task. Same goes for the Hyper-V config reports.

[Mike D]

I think there is some confusion as to what the RecoverAssist disk is. This disk only needs to be created one time, and it can be created at any time even after a system crash as long as you have the Windows installation disk, or another system running the same exact operating system.

RecoverAssist has absolutely no system information for your system in it, that is what is in the Image backup. This is just a boot disk that has the dll boot files for version of Wndows is running so it can load the backup. Once you have created this boot ISO as long as you keep it in a safe place that is all you need.

[corblimey]

Hi Mike

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I understand that it is only required to boot the recovery environment but I kind of made the assumption that if I built the recovery iso from the running os (as apposed to an Windows install disk) the build would included any third party driver files needed to access the hardware (eg raid drivers, etc). I know there is a very good range of drivers included in Windows these days but there are cases when you need to include a third party driver before all your hardware is accessible to Windows.

Have I misunderstood this?

[Mike D]

There is absolutely no difference on creating the disk based on the installed version and creating the disk based on the install disk. We offer the two options so let's say your 2008 r2 system crashes you can go to a Windows 7 computer put in the 2008 r2 installation disk and create a RecoverAssist disk to boot from. Depending on your destination (iSCSI, VHD container for example) require the RecoverAssist disk instead of the Windows installation disk. Both options let you load drivers on the disk, or you can load drivers at boot if needed.

I hope this clears things up for you.