Organization of a competent backup of servers on windows?

Question

Backup

There are 2 win 2016 servers with 5 hv virtual machines (windows guests), 1 physical server with win 2016 (sql express on it), 1 free server ... there are 6 SATA disks of 6 TB each, tell me how best to implement backup ? There is no backup software, it is preferable to use windows backup or the free version of Veeam.
Unfortunately, there is an experience of losing a file server, as it turned out later, a non-working backup ...

Answer 1

Programs are tailored to the situation. There is no general universal remedy.
You can also use standard WIndows mechanisms, they work fine, although they are not always convenient.
As a rule, an image of the system disks of servers is made - for quick deployment.
As a rule, it is more convenient to make disks of virtual machines separately.
Things like a database are better backed up by regular means in most cases.
Here the main thing to pay attention to a few key points -
1) You must have a deployment plan. Imagine the situation, the server has crashed, there are backups and you urgently need to deploy - and what's next? What are your actions on the points?
This is where problems begin for the majority - they set up a backup, according to the principle - there will be a problem, we will figure out how to restore it, and in case of a real failure in conditions of lack of time, they make mistakes, up to accidental destruction of the backup.
Therefore, they backed up - they created a recovery plan, and checked it out.
2) The operation of the backup mechanism must be monitored - so that in case of failure and problems, messages are sent to the responsible persons. Otherwise, in fact, it often turns out that there is a backup, but for the last year.
3) Access to the backup storage over the network should only be available to users who create a backup, no one else, even administrators, should have access. Ideally, the backup server itself takes the backup.
4) It is necessary to regularly carry out scheduled checks and deployments - the infrastructure is changing, and situations are possible that these changes were not taken into account when setting up a backup.
5) Particularly critical data should be stored geographically remotely.

Answer 2

The system can be backed up with built-in tools, databases - with your own, with files - you have to think depending on the situation. Store backups or even better copies of them - on a Linux server, with a connection only for the time of copying - a cryptographer recently came to visit - part of the backups on the Windows balls was lost, it didn’t come to data loss.