Chapter 11 “Maintaining Windows Server 2008 File Services”

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Shadow Copies of Share Folders is a very useful tool that creates point in time copies of the files that you have stored on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 file share.  Users can have access to previous versions of the files they are working on without needing administrator intervention.  Some of the ways that Shadow Copies can be useful are recovering files that were accidentally deleted, recovering files that were accidentally overwritten, and comparing previous versions of a file to the current version and if necessary retrieving the previous version.  The File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) is an additional role service that is available when you install the File Services server role.  This role service was first introduced in Server 2003 R2 and provides tools that help administrators monitor and regulate their server storage.  Some of the tasks that FRSM can perform are establishing quotas that limit the amount of storage space that each user is allowed, create screens that prevent users from storing specific types of files on server drives, create templates that simplify the process of applying quotas and screens, automatically send email to users or administrators when quotas are exceeded or nearly exceeded, and generate reports detailing the storage activities of users.  There are two types of quotas that can be configured, hard quotas and soft quotas.  Hard quotas are strict limits; a user cannot store data to a server drive beyond the hard limit set in the quota without first removing data to create the space needed.  A soft quota has a more relaxed limit, the user may be able to store data but will receive emails that tell him or her that the quota limit has been reached and action is required.  One of the most important duties of an administrator is performing backups of all the critical data on the server.  Windows Server Backup must be installed in order to back up the data and operating system on your server.  You will also need to install Windows PowerShell if you intend to do the backups from the command line.  There are two types of backups, manual and scheduled.  Either the Administrators group or the Backup Operators group can start a manual backup by using Server Backup or the Wbadmin.exe from the command line.  Scheduled backups can be performed by the local administrators group using Server backup or the Wbadmin.exe command.  They must be performed on a local physical drive that has no critical data on it because they will reformat the drive.