Something that resembles an image backup?

I’m really new to Kopia (still processing the documentation) but if i understand correctly, Kopia does not do full system backups. But if someone has an idea how to achieve something like this?? My main concern would be about backing up a Windows Domain Controller.

Well, for things like essential infrastructure hosts, like AD, I’d rather have something that offers some method of emergency restore - that’s not Kopia and I’d always advice strongly against trying to make Kopia do it.

The question you’d have to ask is… how fast do you need to recover from a catastrophic failure of your AD host.

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If one was forced to use kopia for AD image backup, I would (ab)use the fact that AD is quite good at replication itself, so I would have an extra AD replica as a virtual machine running somewhere, then once per day shut it down nicely and when it is off, you can make a kopia backup of its “drive” image. If this is for “restore last working setup” more than archiving, then a policy for it that keeps one or just a few versions would probably be enough. When the backup is sent, restart the AD replica VM and it will sync itself up for all changes it might have missed during backup. If you have a semi-advanced virtualization setup, it should be possible to power it down, snapshot the filesystem on which its image is located and restart the VM again, then run kopia against the snapshot image instead. This would minimize downtime for the AD replica at the cost of some extra disk space. I’ve used similar techniques to backup other kinds of databases which supported replication, though AD is a special kind of DB, but the principle should work the same. Lastly, this image could, and should probably also be used to test recovery once in a while, its no use going through all this trouble and later figure out that the untested recovery didn’t work as planned.

And, as Budy writes, there are good tools for backup up AD, and kopia isn’t one of those. A good tool will have one or more special agents that talk to the AD instance live, does snapshots, quiesces the DBs and extracts the data in a better format than grabbing the whole drive.

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Thanks for responding :slight_smile:

I currently use UrBackup for image backups. But i’m not overly fond of it. So i was looking at Kopia mainly because of the fact that it has support for multiple backends (like webdav and ssh and so on) and the coming webhook support.

So i’ll guess i still have to stick to UrBackup :slight_smile: