Prebuilt New machine coming. Have some questions about OS and bare metal backups

WhiskerBiscuit

What's an ITX?
Original poster
Sep 15, 2018
1
0
I just ordere this from Amazon.

Intel NUC NUC7i3BNK Mini PC/HTPC, Intel Dual-Core i3-7100U 2.4GHz, 16GB DDR4, 4k Support, Dual Monitor Capable, Windows 10 Professional 64Bit (16GB Ram + 256GB SSD)

I plan on using this to run Docker to host services, mainly a bunch of Ubuntu instances for home automation. I was thinking of upgrading this to Server 2016. Do you think that will be a problem?

One thing I want to do is take a backup of the entire OS before I turn anything on. I have Veeam on a usb disk and want to boot to that and take a full image in case I need to do a bare metal restore. I’ve noticed on newer systems that sometimes I have to fuss with the BIOS (security settings) in order to see the drive. Do these intel nuc machines have the same issue? I plan on partitioning the drive for OS and Data. Are there OS backup strategies for bare metal restore I should look at? Veeam has been reliable, but I’m curious about new methods.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,827
4,902
Veeam is the preferred choice for VM backup for a number of reasons, with the non-licensed version you're missing out but you also don't have to have a bare-metal server running Veeam Backup & Recovery. I'd go with it if you are running VMware ESXi, for Hyper-V or KVM there might be other solutions preferred but I have no experience with them.

The BIOS issue you mention is weird. If you haven't secured the drives, it should just work. Do you mean "to see the drive" that it isn't able to boot from it unless you set it in BIOS specifically ? That could be the boot device priorities in play here:

Say you have two SSDs, a USB HDD drive, a USB thumb drive, networking, etcetera. It'll show you per "class" of devices a device to boot from and then a list of those classes. So you might need to to change the boot device priority because it detects a USB thumb drive as well and considers it the same class. I think choosing a boot device before BIOS POST is going to give you a full list of devices. F8 I believe on the NUCs.