Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this or if it has already been answered...
I apologize for the length but I want to make sure I don't leave out anything important. The free clinic where I live has been supported by a local freelance "IT guy" for the past 5 years. About 2 weeks ago he was arrested for stealing from one of his other clients and was let go from the clinic. A few days after that they hired me to come in and change all access so that he could not remotely access or mess up anything. They did not want anything else done until the board could officially discuss and vote on terminating their contract with the old IT guy and signing a contract with me. A few days after that we had a bad storm and the server crashed, losing all of their data. They were under the impression there was a backup somewhere but if there was I have been unable to find it so they have tasked me with rebuilding the server to at least get them up and going again.
I had this big plan of putting the latest free version of vSphere Hypervisor on their server and recreating their server as a VM so that I could us the new free version of Unitrends Enterprise Backup to backup the VM both on a different HDD in the same server and if possible to another computer or external hard drive to have an off site backup.
Unfortunately, their server is a Dell PowerEdge 1800 and will not run the latest vSphere Hypervisor because it does not have a 64 bit processor. They run entirely on donations so they have basically no budget for upgrades and they need it up and running ASAP so for now I put ESXi 3.5 on the server and recreated the server as a VM. However, I am not sure the best way to make a backup from this version. I don't need any fancy automatic backups I would just like to get a copy of the VM so that I could just have a backup so I don't have to start from scratch if it happens again. Also, I am working with the local university to possibly get them to donate one of their old servers that is newer than ours and then take donations to upgrade RAM, etc, and hopefully be able to just throw the VM on the new server (hopefully running the latest vSphere Hypervisor).
Can anyone provide any suggestions on the best/easiest way to get a copy of that VM off of the server?