Occasionally I’ll get a comment on the blog that says, “This post is three years old but it worked” which is really nice to hear. It also means that at least in the case of ShoreTel most stuff is fairly consistent between versions.
I was thinking about backing up ShoreTel servers today and looked at my old post on backing up your server and thought this would be a good time to post again about using a method I’ve found that works well, but that ShoreTel doesn’t seem to talk about.
I am going to disclaim this, as ShoreTel does not suggest it. However, if you poke through this blog, other forums, and talk to ShoreTel customers and partners you’ll find out that basically none of them set up a backup plan on standalone servers. If they do it’s ShoreTel’s included scripts, which almost always fail after a minor update, if they ever worked in the first place.
Backing Up Your Stand Alone Server With Windows Server Backup
You’ll need a NAS or other remote storage for this. These instructions are a little more ‘theory’ than the precise step by step instructions I’d rather give. They’re also geared for Server 2008 and Server 2012. It should work just fine with Server 2016 and forward as Server Backup hasn’t changed much since the 2003 days. If you are still using 2003 you’ll need an external hard drive and a floppy disk probably.
You will also need an installation media for Server 2008/2012 for this to restore correctly. You can usually download this from Microsoft. Someone with a volume license agreement or a Microsoft partner can usually get you the Installation Media (I’ve never had a problem getting one for free if it was an emergency). If you have an install disk from a major hardware vendor like Dell, this will work too as you aren’t actually using the install media to do the installation. I do not think you’ll need your Server Key, but you should be keeping a copy of that somewhere safe anyway.
Step 1 – Open server backup and select the option for a scheduled backup.
Step 2 – You will want to do a full back up to a remote share. The remote share is your NAS. Depending the on the version you may be able to do incremental backups to a remote share as well. Don’t do this. Just do a full, bare metal backup of everything every night or once a week or whatever you feel comfortable with.
Note: A word on the scheduling. You want this to be some crazy hour when nothing is going on. I’ve checked logs on a few servers with this set up. It does not take long, anywhere from ten minutes to an hour at most. Depends on the speed of the machine, NAS and network. It uses shadow copy snapshots so it basically is just copying an image of the machine when the backup copy job starts. I HAVE run these during the day and it doesn’t seem to mess anything up. I would not trust that to happen on a really busy server.
Note 2: This method just backs up the server once, and wipes out the previous backup. Because ShoreTel is constantly writing and deleting stuff, I am of the opinion that a full backup every time is better. This is really for disaster recovery not recovering a deleted extension or a voicemail someone accidentally got rid of.
Restoring the ShoreTel Server
This is pretty straight forward. You want to boot from the Server 2008/2012 installation media and select the “Restore my server” or advanced options instead of the “Install” button. You’ll find a restore from image option. You can usually browse for the image on a network location, sometimes you may need to put it on an external drive (May be a version thing).
You’ll need similar or the exact same hardware to use this. Some backup software will let you restore on dissimilar hardware but, I have no idea how well this works with ShoreTel. It’s probable you could make this work somehow with virtualization though. Newer versions of Server Backup make a VHD file so, it’s entirely likely you could boot it directly in HyperV, but that’s just speculation.