ShadowProtect Server is one part of the
StorageCraft Recover-Ability™ solution. This solution provides you with the
products and services you need to recover your Windows IT environment anytime
and anywhere, and from any disaster, great or small.
ShadowProtect Server software creates sector-level backup images of your Windows
server disk drives. A sector-level backup image is a point-in-time
representation of your disk drive and therefore includes not just data but also
the operating system, applications, services, and configuration settings.
Because your backup image contains everything on your server, when you need to
recover its drive, you can do so in minutes rather than hours or days.
ShadowProtect Server helps you meet your
company’s recovery objectives
Servers are crucial to your organization’s
everyday operations. Should a server die, how would that impact your
business? How much money could be lost in revenue and productivity per hour
that the server isn’t functioning?
Recovery time
objective (RTO) is a
calculation of the maximum allowable downtime after which the consequences
of being down are unacceptable. Reduce the gap between RTO and the recovery
time actual (RTA, the
time it actually takes
your IT team to get servers functioning), and that’s money in your company’s
pocket.
ShadowProtect
Server software features flexible recovery options to help you meet (or
beat) your RTO by
reducing the time that systems and data are offline. ShadowProtect lets you:
- Rapidly
access individual data files and folders
- Restore
to the same or different hardware or a virtual environment in a matter
of minutes
- Boot a
backup image as a virtual machine (VM) for a quick, temporary fix
ShadowProtect Server software can also help you
with your business’s recovery
point objective (RPO,
the maximum amount of data over time that might be lost). How much data can
your company afford to lose (or afford to re-enter)? Eight hours’ worth of
data? Two hours’ worth? Even less?
You can schedule
ShadowProtect Server to continually take incremental backup images (these
images record just the changes to the drive since the last backup image).
You can schedule incremental backup images to happen as often as every 15
minutes, so
that your company is never at risk of losing more than a few minutes of
data.
Vital protection of your Windows IT environment
Common scenarios for which administrators,
technicians, and other IT pros use ShadowProtect Server:
-
Recovering data such as files and folders
-
Performing bare metal recovery after a server failure
-
Restoring to the same hardware after a system error causes a server
crash
-
Migrating to new hardware or virtual environment
- Testing
new applications prior to introducing them into your production server
environment
- Testing
your business’s disaster recovery plan
Read our
ShadowProtect Scenario
Guide for detailed, proven
examples of when to use ShadowProtect Server.
Features and benefits of ShadowProtect Server
Backup
The Backup
Wizard enables you to:
- Capture
everything—systems, applications, configuration settings, services, data—on
your servers
- Back up Microsoft SQL, Exchange, and
SharePoint servers and other critical application servers, including updates
in memory
- Encrypt a backup job to protect backup
images to securely protect data
- Save backups to any disk device (such as
removable, local, and network drives) or any optical media (CDs, DVDs, and
Blu-Ray discs)
- Back up a non-bootable system before
attempting a restore operation (usingStorageCraft
Recovery Environment)
Scheduling
The Backup
Wizard also lets you:
- Execute a one-time full
backup that you can archive
- Schedule backups to occur automatically
- Schedule incremental backups to run as
often as every 15 minutes
- Set up subsequent full backups to be
differential to save on storage space
- Manage the retention of backup images
Remote Management
Management view and client/agent
optionsenable you to:
- Install the ShadowProtect
agent on a server or desktop without having to visit the machine
- Remotely manage both ShadowProtect
Server and ShadowProtect Desktop nodes
- Choose to receive notification when
server or desktop backup jobs succeed or fail
Testing
With the Verify
Image tool, StorageCraft ImageReady™ technology, and StorageCraft
VirtualBoot™ technology, you
can:
- Verify backup images to
ensure they’re in a known good state for fast and reliable recovery
- Automatically run Chkdsk or other
scripts on mounted volumes to determine data and application integrity
- Mount an Exchange Server backup
(including system, data, and log volumes) to test the .EDB files and verify
they’re intact or run cleanup if they’re in a dirty shutdown state
- Boot a backup image to a virtual machine
to test whether a restored system would function properly
Image Management
With the Image
Conversion Tool, you can:
- Consolidate files (full
backup plus incrementals) into a single new backup image for archiving
- Split a backup image file into smaller
files (a spanned set) for backup on DVD or Blu-Ray
- Convert backup image files to a virtual
disk in either .VHD (Hyper-V-compatible) or .VMDK (VMware-compatible) format
for restoration or migration to a VM
- Set a consolidated or converted backup
file’s compression setting or encryption
Recovery
The Restore
Wizard, Explore
Backup Wizard, StorageCraft VirtualBoottechnology, and StorageCraft Hardware
Independent Restore™ technology let
you:
- Perform a bare metal
restore in minutes
- Restore a system to the same or
different hardware or to virtual environments
- Mount a backup image quickly and browse
it in order to recover a file or folder
- Restore an entire data volume from a
backup image file
- Quickly restore access to a database
server by mounting a point-in-time backup image
- Rapidly boot a backup image as a VM
(temporary system failover)
Migration
The Backup
Wizard, Restore
Wizard, Image
Conversion Tool, and Hardware
Independent Restore allows you
to:
- Migrate a backup image
from one physical machine to another
- Migrate a backup image of a physical
server to a virtual environment
