A small businesses has a Windows Small Business Server 2011 server and uses the SBS Console to make backups to external drives to be stored off-site. How do you restore files from these external backup disks without having another SBS 2011 server?
I tried the WBADMIN utility on a Windows 7 Pro PC. It was able to access the backup but the START RECOVERY command said: "not supported in this version of window", which I assumes means this feature has been stripped from the desktop versions of Windows.
I tried booting from the external backup drive itself - that didn't work. Might booting from the server's install CD/DVD media on a Win7 PC provide a command prompt where START RECOVERY can be run? Or maybe this bootable media has some other mechanism from copying files from the backup to another drive? Would a Windows Azure virtual Windows Server be able to access the local external drive? If so, that might be acceptable as this isn't expected to be a frequent operation.
Surely there does is some reasonably easy way to retrieve files from off-site external backups that don't involve provisioning another SBS server.