Posts Tagged ‘backup software’
Setting Up Your Server Backup
We get a lot of requests for best practices and recommendations for ways to set up your server environment. ShadowProtect makes it pretty easy to backup everything on your Windows servers, but there are ways to set things up so that you’re maximizing your resources and your business continuity.
So one of our technical engineers has put together a great guide that outlines some ways to configure your servers and keep them up and running. It involves backing up each Windows server with ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) and running ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise on your critical servers so they’re backed up onsite and offsite. This way, when there’s a business disruption — from a server crash to a category 5 hurricane — you can restore your servers, recover your data, and get your business running again.
These scenarios involve our new VirtualBoot technology, that allows you to boot a ShadowProtect backup image file into a virtual machine in a matter of a few short minutes, as well as HeadStart Restore, which allows you to restore your backups before they’re needed. You can find out more about ShadowProtect by visiting the product pages, or you’re always welcome to contact us with your questions.
Choosing a Backup Solution Provider
For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), finding the right value added reseller (VAR) can make the difference in making your business run smoothly. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources or the personnel to make all of the IT decisions on their own. It’s important to find a channel partner who can do (or already has done) the research for you and help you make decision about the technology that will work best in your business.
So how do you begin choosing a VAR for your business? Tech Target has a great article about the steps you need to take before you make any decisions. They also talked to Greg Schulz, an analyst at Storage IO, who gave some great advice when you seek out a reseller.
“Interview them!” urged Schulz. “That is what you need to do to begin to understand their capabilities. If you were going to hire someone to be on your staff to do design optimization and improve backup you would do the same thing.” Furthermore, he advised SMBs to try to meet some of the people who would be involved in delivering services. “The more you plan to rely on a VAR, the more you should want to know them and their people. Their skill sets and ability to provide knowledge transfer are key,” he said.
The article lists some specific questions to ask as you make your evaluation. In particular, you’ll want to find out what kind of backup software they recommend and if that solution is specifically designed with SMBs in mind.
StorageCraft Events
The SMBmigration.com IT Pro Conference is next weekend in New Orleans, and we’ll be there. If you’re heading to the conference May 27th -30th, check out a few things StorageCraft will be offering there.
First of all, we’ll be making a presentation at the conference showing resellers how to offer simple and profitable disaster recovery, data protection and migration services to their customers. In a tough economy, it’s always great to learn how you can simplify services and make a profit, too.
We’ll also be giving solution providers the opportunity to join the StorageCraft Reseller Partner Program. This program is easy to join because it doesn’t cost you anything, and we give you NFR copies of StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server and ShadowProtect Desktop just for joining. There are lots of other benefits, too.
Plus, we”ll be highlighting all of the cool features in ShadowProtect 4.0 – features that help solution providers improve their recovery time objectives while simplifying backup and disaster recovery management.
The following week, we’ll be presenting at the ASCII Reseller Success Summit in Chicago. So if you’re planning to attend either of these events, make sure you stop by our booth and say hello.
For more information about these two conferences, or to register, you can check them out online.
ShadowProtect Desktop is available
StorageCraft is releasing ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0 today. Like ShadowProtect Server, it includes some of the same cool features in that are in ShadowProtect Server 4.0, such as VirtualBoot™ and backup verification and re-verification.
It’s also very easy to test drive it with the free 30-day trial version. The trial has all of the features of the full version, except for the recovery environment, which isn’t quite as restrictive as that may sound. For example, you can recover individual files and folders from backup images with the trial version, using the Explore Backup wizard and you can recover data volumes on your system, as well. You just can’t restore your system (primary) volume because you don’t have the bootable recovery CD.
So go ahead and test drive ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0. We have the trial up on our Web site, or you can download it from sites like PC World. Try it, you’ll like it enough to buy it.
StorageCraft Launches ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise
StorageCraft released a brand new product this morning, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ 4.0. ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is an add-on feature for ShadowProtect Server™ and ShadowProtect Small Business Server™. It has a few more features than the basic product, ShadowProtect ImageManager, which comes with all of the ShadowProtect™ products.
The revolutionary feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is HeadStart Restore™, which allows you to simultaneously restore your server backup images, while you’re still backing up your server.
“System restores often involve terabytes of data, which means a realistic RTO is hours,” said Scott Barnes, chief technology officer at StorageCraft. “With HeadStart Restore, we’ve drastically reduced the time it takes to recover your systems and data because most of the system and data recovery occurred before there was even a failure.”
With HeadStart Restore — or HSR — you set up a system restore “job” in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to begin the server recovery right away.
ShadowProtect Server continues to back up any incremental changes that are made on the server, which also get sent to the HeadStart Restore job and applied. The Lag Time Apply feature in HSR also allows administrators to delay incremental changes – to account for corruption from malware or a virus. By default, this is set to three days, but this can be changed to suit IT requirements.
In the event of a disaster, the administrator finalizes the restore – which usually takes seconds to apply the incremental updates – then prepares the virtual environment, runs ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology, reboots the server, and is back up and running. The elapsed time is several minutes, not several hours. So you’re able to restore a server with even multi-terabytes of data in 15-20 minutes.
“Being able to get a jump on the restore process with HeadStart Restore is a tremendous asset for our business and for our customers,” said Shawn Massey, director of NetAssist at Camera Corner/Connecting Point Computer Center. “We’re able to get servers up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take. Downtime is expensive, and knowing that it won’t take all day or all weekend to rebuild a server is invaluable.”
You can find all kinds of additional information about StorageCraft ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise 4.0 on the ShadowProtect product pages, including data sheets and white papers. Or e-mail sales@storagecraft.com.
ShadowProtect Server 4.0 and ShadowProtect Small Business Server Available
StorageCraft released ShadowProtect Server™ 4.0 and ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ 4.0 this morning. There are some great new features in this new version that you will definitely want to check out.
In particular VirtualBoot™. With VirtualBoot, you can right click on any ShadowProtect™ image file and boot it as a virtual machine. 
This feature makes it very easy to test new software in your server environment or boot legacy systems for archival purposes.
“We could not be more excited about VirtualBoot and the other features that ShadowProtect 4.0 is bringing to the table,” said Sean Furman, president of STF Consulting. “The new functionality is truly game changing for us and we look forward to utilizing ShadowProtect 4.0 in our managed services offering.”
VirtualBoot uses Sun VirtualBox to boot the file into .VMDK or .VHD format.
Other features in ShadowProtect Server 4.0:
- Central management console,
- Virtual converter,
- ShadowProtect ImageManager™,
- Image verification and re-verification,
- Image consolidation,
- Resume on Interruption,
- Hardware Independent Restore™ (HIR),
- Bare metal recovery,
- Granular recovery of files and folders in moments.
Check out the ShadowProtect product pages for additional information, including data sheets, white papers and product tours.
Simple Way to Avoid Data Loss
We’ve been saying it, and you’ve heard it time and again: Back it up! It’s the sure-fire way to avoid the nightmare of a fried hard disk. A recent article on Gizmodo.com ( The Five Stages of Data Loss Grief ) is a perfect reminder of the whole reason to back up your data — to avoid the disaster altogether. The article is pretty funny, taking you through the stages you go through, much the same way that therapy takes you through the stages of grieving the loss of a loved one. The problem here is that this is an issue that’s entirely avoidable. A simple backup plan will eliminate the need to go through any of these stages. Instead, you’ll experience something like this:
1. Oh, no! My hard drive crashed.
2. Boy am I glad I backed up my data. Now it will just take a few minutes to restore my system.
Now that wasn’t difficult at all, was it? The reality is that while technology is great, it’s also prone to failure. Hard drives die, so back them up.
If you don’t already have one, buy backup software (like ShadowProtect, of course) that you can automate. Install it and set up a schedule. How often should you back up your data? The answer lies in how often you’re making changes to your drive. For most of us, a few times a day is more than sufficient, especially if your backup is running in the background so you don’t notice any change in your efficiency. But if you’re a power user or writing the great American novel, you may want to schedule backups several times an hour. Save your backups to a removable hard drive and then set it up to e-mail you in the event your backup fails. That may be your first indication that your hard drive is dying.
Next, make sure you have a separate backup of your hard drive saved in a remote location; update your off-site backup periodically. You may feel secure taking your off-site drive to a friend’s house for safekeeping. But if you’re protecting secrets that could bring down nations, you may want to secure that backup in a location such as a safety deposit box. If your friend’s home burns down (or the bank floods), after empathizing with your friend, make a new backup.
These steps may take a little time to plan and accomplish, but in the long run, you’ll sleep better and be much happier when your drive fails. Think of all the time you’ll save then.
Final Discount Pricing Offer
StorageCraft is now offering competitive upgrade pricing for BakBone customers who decide to make the switch to ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software. The discount offer is for current users of BakBone NetVault Backup, Bare Metal Recovery and Real-Time Data Protector.
To get the competitive upgrade discount pricing — which is 35% off list price — customers have to show proof of license, like a copy of their license certificate, a copy of their receipt or an e-mail confirmation of a software download. Send an e-mail to discounts@storagecraft.com or send a fax to +1 801 545-4705 along with your proof of purchase. (You can mail in your product CD as a proof of purchase, too.) The offer is available in North America and South America only through March 15, 2010.
Eliminating Backup Windows – for Physical and Virtual Servers
The e-mail ad touted a “brand new solution” that solves the problem that’s overwhelmed IT teams for years — completing backup jobs in the short amount of time available, the “backup window.” The ad said the company had found a way to incorporate imaging technology to eliminate lengthy backup jobs.
The only problem is, this isn’t new, as ShadowProtect users can attest. Whether you’re backing up physical systems or virtual systems, ShadowProtect takes point-in-time snapshots of the server’s operating system and data. Then, while your server remains online, ShadowProtect creates a backup image of everything in your server environment.
The scheduler in ShadowProtect lets you specify how frequently you run your backup. For example, you can set it up to run a full backup every evening, and take incremental backup images throughout the day — even as frequently as every 15 minutes.
So while the problem of shorter backup windows may be an old one, the solution isn’t necessarily new. And even if you’re planning to migrate to virtual systems — something you can also accomplish with ShadowProtect — you don’t need to change your backup system just because you’re moving into the virtual world. You can do protect both physical and virtual systems with ShadowProtect.
Additional Competitive Upgrade Pricing Offer
StorageCraft is also offering competitive upgrade pricing forSymantec customers who decide to make the switch to ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software. The discount offer is for current users of Symantec Backup Exec, Live State Recovery and V2i Protector.
To get the competitive upgrade discount pricing — which is 35% off list price — customers have to show proof of license, like a copy of their license certificate, a copy of their receipt or an e-mail confirmation of a software download. Send an e-mail to discounts@storagecraft.com or send a fax to +1 801 545-4705 along with your proof of purchase. (You can mail in your product CD as a proof of purchase, too.) The offer is available in North America and South America only through March 15, 2010.
We’ll be announcing more competitive upgrade discounts for additional products next week.
Corporate World Is Getting the “Backup” Message
It looks like the corporate world may finally be getting the message: backup is important. A new IDC report says that more than half (53%) of all corporations they surveyed have deployed centralized backup software to protect company PCs. That’s a big increase over previous surveys. The report also shows that about a third of companies (32.5%) are still relying on individual employees to backup their own computers.
The report also found that the larger the company, the more likely it is to have centralized PC backup. Plus, it isn’t just regulatory worries about backing up company data that have corporations worried. They’re also concerned about the possibility of hardware failure.
Competitive Upgrade Pricing
StorageCraft is offering competitive upgrade pricing for Computer Associates customers who decide to make the switch to ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software. The discount offer is for current users of CA ARCserve Backup or Disk Backup and Restore.
To get the competitive upgrade discount pricing — which is 35% off list price — customers have to show proof of license, like a copy of their license certificate, a copy of their receipt or an e-mail confirmation of a software download. Send an e-mail to discounts@storagecraft.com or send a fax to +1 801 545-4705 along with your proof of purchase. (You can mail in your product CD as a proof of purchase, too.) The offer is available in North America and South America only through March 15, 2010.
Desktop Backup Tips
With backup software like ShadowProtect, it’s very easy to have a copy of everything on your hard drive. But what’s the best way to make sure you’re backing up what you need to? For PC users, here are some tips that will give you a little peace of mind.
Once you install ShadowProtect, it’s a good idea to set a backup schedule right away, which is very easy using the Backup Wizard. Open the Backup Wizard, click Next, then check the volume (drive) you want backed up. For most people, this will be the C:\ volume — the primary drive with your system, programs and data. If you have your hard drive partitioned to separate your personal files and data, you’ll want to back up that secondary partition, too. Click Next.
Now you need to choose a location to hold your backup images — such as a removable disk drive that you’re dedicating to hold your images or over a network to a user folder. No matter where your location is, you’ll need to make sure you have enough disk space to hold your backup image files. Click the Browse button and navigate to the specific backup location; you may want to create a backup folder for this purpose (e.g.: JanesLaptop, JohnsBackupImages). Click Next.
Now you can specify your backup schedule. It’s a good idea to take a full backup every week and additional incremental backups through the workday, so click Weekly and click on a day and choose a time for your Full backup. Now choose how often you’d like to make incremental images which will backup the changes between your full backups. For most people, hourly incrementals is sufficient. Once you’ve created the schedule you like, click Next.
On the Options screen, you can choose to add a password to your image files, compress your image files or choose Advanced options. One thing you might want to do is click on the Retention tab and create a Retention policy, which will help free up storage, if your space is limited.
After you’ve made your selections, click Next. You’ll see a summary of your Backup Job, so check it over and see if you need to make any changes. Check the Execute Now box to run your initial backup right away.
Now you’re set. If you have any questions along the way, make sure you consult the ShadowProtect User Guide or visit the StorageCraft Support Center. You can also find additional information about ShadowProtect backup software at www.ShadowProtect.com.
New Year’s Backup Resolutions – How are you Doing?
Disk Improvements Increase Backup Capacity
The Data Without a Backup
StorageCraft Nationwide Tour: Denver, CO and Glenwood Springs, CO – November 18th & 19th 2009
StorageCraft Nationwide Tour: Seattle, WA – November 18th 2009
Who’s Handling Your Backup?
Is your data backed up?
It may seem like a ridiculous idea. Of course all of your data has a backup, right? Think again. This tale of IT woe shows that it can happen at any small business.
A question often asked is, “how could anyone be so stupid as to not back up data?” Reflecting on my own experience, I see how it could happen. Sometimes a series of events can interfere with important and seemingly basic IT tasks, such as backups.
Maybe that’s the first question for solution providers to ask a small business owner. And if they do have a backup in place, will it work when they need it? Just having a backup doesn’t mean that it will be effective when called upon. Here are some more questions to ask SMBs about their backup system:
- What would it cost you if a server failed – not just in terms of hardware and software, but in terms of productivity?
- What is your Recovery Time Objective (RTO)? Can you afford lengthy downtime while you spend days trying to restore your server?
- How reliable is your current backup/disaster recovery solution? Have you ever tried to restore a server, desktop and laptop?
- How long did it take to restore? Do you know how quickly you could be up and running again if a server, desktop or laptop no longer worked? Would it take you days or even weeks to have access to your data?
- Would you have access to the data even if the server could not be salvaged? Would you be able to restore your systems and data to new hardware or virtual hardware?
The solution, of course, is something you can offer them, as potential customers. By using the StorageCraft Managed Service Provider (MSP) licensing model you can provide ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software on a monthly subscription basis to your customers. You can do this without any up-front costs because you will only be charged – each month – for the licensing you are currently using, for the licenses you’ve already sold. If a customer orders 10 server licenses and then only uses eight, you will only be charged for the eight they use, and only during the months they use them.
We have tons of information about selling backup and disaster recovery as a service to your customers. Check here first to learn more about the StorageCraft MSP Partner program.