Will Longhorn Serverhave a better backup solution that NTbackup?

While Longhorn Server Backup is not a feature by feature replacement of NTBackup, we feel that LHSB will do a good job of solving most of customers pain points around backup. We gathered feedback from NTBackup customers and built a new backup solution from scratch to simplify backup and make it more reliable. There are feature differences e.g. weve removed tape backup support but added disk backup support and support for optical media like DVDs. Overall, we believe that the customers will like what they see with the new Server Backup tool and we would love to hear feedback on the same.

We had some initial problems with Windows Server 2007 (Server Longhorn) "Backup". These were ultimately found to be due to eSATA operations not having been enabled. "Backup" has worked properly since this hardware problem was corrected."Backup" is a very nice utility. We typically dedicate four separate SATA drives as follows: C: the operating system partition, D: and E: for user application programs and F: for "Backup" data storage. We also backup to an "ez bus dts" which is an external eSATA storage device that is marketed by Apricorn. It can be connected to the computer by either USB 2.0 or eSATA. Both connections work properly with Windows Server 2007 Beta 3.We were pleasantly impressed that a full backup followed by a "bare metal" restore worked flawlessly. A complete restore takes about 8 minutes.

I spoke too soon.. The "drive disconnect" problem still exists. I had thought that enabling the SATA II drives for 300MB/Second operation had cured the problem, but it is intermittent and occurs at variable points in a large file copy. Interestingly, others are now reporting this same problem on the Vista forum.It is an intermittent problem that only occurs when copying large files - typically 8GB plus. It happens when using Microsoft's "Backup" and when trying to copy the result of the backup from one SATA disk to another. All the internal SATA drives are SATA II and they are on the same controller chip on an EVGA nForce 680i Mainboard. The problem looks like a hardware timing problem because the copy fails at different points in a large file copy operation. Interestingly, an internal SATA II drive copy to an external SATA II drive that is USB 2 connected doesn't have any copy failures. When a drive suddenly disappears, there is no remaining reference to it. It is as if the software has completely detached the drive. For example, "D:" is gone and doesn't reappear with a disk rescan. You have to do a cold start. The only error message is that a file cannot be accessed. This is true enough because the operating system thinks that the drive no longer exists. The disappearance can be either the drive from which the data are read or the drive to which a file is being written.It is possible that the problem is related to a volume shadow copy. There are a number of KBs related to this issue on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. I have not seen any similar comment about Vista/Windows Server 2008.