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.