Hi,
We are running DP7.03.
I think I am overlooking something. For years we made backups with DP on file-level and disater recovery. This works fine as it is, but backups as well as restores are rather slow because of all small files. We are now investigating to move to image backup for some specific machines to lower restore time. Following the manual / online help I add for example \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 and \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 for a testmachine. The help states it will use VSS to 'free' open files and allow the disk to be mounted for backup. Nothing is less true:
[Major] From: RBDA@nlevappv1.ehv.ict-net.nl "[Disk Image]: xxxxxxxxxxxx.xx.xx" Time: 30-5-2014 10:06:30
Section \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 cannot be locked!
Nowhere is it adding the disk to a snapshot or anything. Same happens when I take another physical disk. What use does an image backup have like this? When will NO files at all be in use on production systems? The manual / help is contradicting itself; it states to use VSS and also states 'Disk image backup fails if a file on the target system is open since Data Protector cannot lock the drive'.
We have a mix of physical machines and Hyper-V VM's, but we don't use any storage-snapshot functinality for the VM's, as for now we want a backup procedure as uniform as possible for both VM and physical. However for the VM's I know I can do that.
So basically I want to make block-level / RAW images of the machines, especially the physical ones. How to do that?