Backup on Windows - Is VSS good enough?

[jonsilver]

We are implementing our backup / recovery strategy. We have a windows machine with multiple vendor products and we run many of them.

We were thinking that instead of going through each of the product's admins to do backups, that we would just use VMware and backup the entire machine.

The question though, is that these productsz each have their own database. In some cases it informix and another product uses postgres.

If we backup with VMware, VSS quieces the disk, but these database files are still open and who know where the filepointer is. Don't we

still need to backup the databases in addition to VMware and VSS?

thanks much,

jonathan

[kjb007]

Most backup software will have a way of handling things such as databases, but some will not.  In any case, without being able to properly quiesce memory and fs, as VSS should do, you are getting at best a crash consistent copy of the data.  If that is ok with you, then normal practices will suffice.  In our case, even on top of regular backups, we will typically write exports to disk, and back those up as well when regular OS backups occur.

-KjB