Posts Tagged ‘server recovery’
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.
Tech Tip: Recovering an Incomplete Image
Editor’s note: This tip comes from Nate, one of StorageCraft’s amazing software engineers.
Recently, one of our customers was taking a full backup when the server’s RAID array died, tragically before the backup itself was complete. The customer had no other backup of this server. He asked us if there was any way to gain access to the contents of this partially-complete backup. It turns out, there is.
When ShadowProtect is in the process of creating a backup image file, the image’s file name has a .tmp extension to indicate that the image file is not yet complete. Once complete, the image file is renamed to its final name (with a .spf or .spi extension). This .tmp file was all that the customer had to work with. We had him rename it to INCOMPLETE.SPF and then execute the following three commands from within the cmd.exe command line shell:
- cd “\Program Files\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect”
- set SP_REPAIR_MODE=yes
- sbrun -mdn ( sbset -c “D:\INCOMPLETE.SPF” : sbcrypt -50 : sbfile –wd “D:\COMPLETE.spf” )
The above command (which works on ShadowProtect 3.3+) takes the incomplete backup image file and from it generates a new, complete, backup image file. The new file is complete in the sense that it can be used with the restore and mount tools, even though it will be missing some data (as the backup image file from which it was generated was incomplete). The above commands assume that the files are in the root of the D: drive. If you’re performing these steps yourself, make sure you adjust the paths for your own scenario, and make sure that there are spaces before and after all of the colon ‘:’ and parentheses ‘(‘ ‘)’ characters. If you omit the spaces around these characters, then you’ll get a syntax error. Finally, if your image file was encrypted with a password, the third command (the sbrun command) will pause and wait for you to enter the image’s password before it continues.