You may not know about it, but ShadowProtect comes with a handy utility called ShadowProtect ImageManager™. It comes with most versions of ShadowProtect, except ShadowProtect IT Edition™ and ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange™.

ShadowProtect ImageManager works with servers and with desktops and has several cool features that can really help you manage your backup image files. If you’re taking several backups each day, as you should, these backup image files can start eating up your disk space pretty fast, unless you have a way to manage them.

That’s why ShadowProtect ImageManager allows you to automatically consolidate point-in-time backup image files. Once you set it up, it can collapse all your daily images into one “daily” file. Then, each week it can collapse those “daily” files into one “weekly” file. And then it will collapse those “weekly” files into a “monthly” file. This helps minimize disk space. This is why we recommend that you set your ShadowProtect backups to perform “continuous incrementals.” Then it’s easy for ShadowProtect ImageManager to help you save disk space and collapse those incremental files each day, week and month.

In addition, ShadowProtect ImageManager will verify and re-verify your backup images. This way you can be certain all of your backups are in a good state, just in case you need them to recover your system.

Finally, you can also set up ShadowProtect ImageManager to track the status of your backups and notify you in the event of a backup job success — or failure. Now you can know right away if something goes wrong.

Earlier this year, StorageCraft also introduced a new version of ShadowProtect ImageManager, called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It’s designed specifically for servers and has two additional features – HeadStart Restore™ and image verification. In our next blog article, we’ll spend some time explaining those features and its additional per-server licensing requirements.