StorageCraft: Leading provider of backup, data recovery and computer migration software

Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform

2010-09-01T18:00:16Z

Looking for a way to have your cloud and still make money, too? We announced our new joint cloud backup venture today, the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform. The news announcement highlights our partnership and how MSPs can use the Business Continuity Suite to backup their customers’ systems and data near-line and off-site — without it costing an arm and a leg.

In the next few weeks, Symform and StorageCraft will offer Web-based training courses so you can learn how the Business Continuity Suite works and how to set it up to get the most benefit for your customers. Basically, you use StorageCraft ShadowProtect technology to backup servers, desktops and laptops and then save the point-in-time backup images to the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud.

The Business Continuity Suite will help you provide the following:

• Get systems up and running quickly after a catastrophic failure.

• Backup on-site and replicate to the cloud for flexible disaster recovery options.

• Restore to bare metal, to dissimilar hardware or to and from virtual environments.

• Multiple levels of encryption and military grade security of backup files to prevent intrusion.

• Schedule full and incremental backups to be saved automatically on-site and in the cloud.

• Contribute excess storage and get valuable cloud storage in return.

• Rapid recovery of files, folders or your entire system should a disaster occur.

You can learn more about the Business Continuity Suite at www.businesscontinuitysuite.com, where you’ll find white papers, data sheets, an analyst’s report and more. Or sign up for the free, one-hour classes which will show you how you can offer simple, affordable cloud backup to your customers.

Intel and McAfee: A marriage made in cloud heaven?

2010-08-19T17:15:50Z

The channel is buzzing on today’s news that Intel is acquiring McAfee, the security technology firm, for nearly $8 billion. The VAR Guy says this new union should cause a little fear and trembling in Redmond and Mountain View as it is signaling that Intel doesn’t trust Microsoft and Symantec to keep IT secure as everything moves to the cloud. So will this be a marriage made in cloud heaven? Will Intel, by acquiring McAfee, keep business data safe and secure, no matter where it’s housed?

It will be many months before we have answers to these questions, but it’s still fun to ask them. In the mean time, this could create great opportunities for channel partners with an eye on the future who are looking for serious security alternatives. If Intel can successfully merge the companies and the technologies, it will create an opening for solution providers who want to deliver solid security embedded in hardware, and low margins. It may be a leap forward for business continuity moving into the cloud era.

No one is saying Intel’s relationship with Microsoft is over. But they’ll certainly be depending on their own brand for security solutions in the future. Channel partners will want to be asking these same questions as they set disaster recovery planning and future business migration to the cloud.

Setting Up Your Server Backup

2010-08-17T20:52:24Z

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.

ShadowProtect Server Scenario Guide

2010-08-10T19:41:27Z

ShadowProtect Server and ShadowProtect Small Business Server have a lot of uses beyond backup and disaster recovery. You may not even know all of the ways that ShadowProtect Server can help you protect your valuable business data. That’s why we’ve put together a scenario guide that shows several different ways you can use ShadowProtect Server for various problems.

For example, if you thought ShadowProtect Server was just a tool to help you perform server backup or bare metal recovery, you will be pleasantly surprised. Some of the other use cases include server migration, granular recovery of files and folders, disaster recovery testing and planning, backup verification and backup management.

The scenario guide is posted on our Web site as a PDF. Download it to find out all of the ways that the latest version in the award-winning ShadowProtect line of backup, disaster recovery and migration software can help you protect your data.

Choosing a Backup Solution Provider

2010-08-09T18:03:15Z

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.

ShadowProtect Server Review in Redmondmag.com

2010-08-03T21:17:34Z

Redmond Magazine just posted a review roundup of several backup and disaster recovery products for servers. The review spotlights four products designed especially for SMBs, including StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™. The reviewer gave ShadowProtect high marks, and pointed out several great features.

Backups in SP are image-based, using the underlying VSS technology in Windows Server and providing very fast backups after the first full backup, as only changed sectors are backed up.

SP is a comprehensive product, offering efficient backups and smoothly blending the physical and virtual worlds for easy disaster recovery.

Check out the full review online and see why ShadowProtect is a great choice, especially if maximizing business continuity is really important for your company.

Recover Faster

2010-08-03T21:18:56Z

In the last article, we focused on the features in ShadowProtect ImageManager™ and how they can help you manage your backup image files. In April, StorageCraft released an enhanced version of the product called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It has all of the features in the standard version: consolidation of backup image files, file verification as well as notification settings.

But ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise also includes two additional features that make it much easier to improve business continuity and lower your recovery time objective (RTO), the maximum amount of time your server systems can be out of commission. These features are HeadStart Restore™ and replication.

HeadStart Restore – or HSR – allows you to begin the server recovery process right away, before a disaster. Whether it’s a natural disaster that took you out or a RAID router meltdown, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get access to your data as quickly as possible and you have to get your business running again.

First, you need to set up ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) to take regular backups of your data, then ShadowProtect will take snapshots of a point in time on your server. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups – just the deltas or small changes to your server – throughout the day.

The next thing you do is set ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to create a restore job for a specific server. Once you’ve set up that job, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise updates that restore job with the incremental changes that are made, so your restore job has all of the data updates that were made throughout the day. Here’s the really cool part: when a catastrophe strikes, you won’t have to wait hours and hours (or days and days) to get that server online again, because HSR has already been restoring the server. Recovery starts and is ongoing as your backups continue.

To get the server online, it will take just a few more steps. First, you finalize your restore job, which takes just a few seconds. Now you need to get it ready to restore into a virtual machine so you run ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology. Now you just reboot your server, and you’re up and running again. This process takes 15-20 minutes, even if you have a multi-TB volume of data.

The other key feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is replication. Now you can send your backup images to an off-site location so that your backups are secure in case your primary location is wiped out by flood, fire or another sort of catastrophe.

You’ll want to note that ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is licensed per server. So one license allows you to perform one HeadStart Restore job, one on-site replication and one off-site replication.

You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page. Included there is a product overview which explains just what it is and how it works.

Manage Your Backups with ShadowProtect ImageManager

2010-07-28T07:49:36Z

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.

ShadowProtect 4.0.1 Is Available

2010-07-26T09:33:08Z

A new version of StorageCraft ShadowProtect is available: ShadowProtect 4.0.1. It has several feature enhancements, including improvements to VirtualBoot™, an improved Recovery Wizard in the StorageCraft Recovery Environment and updated help links. There’s a lot more detail about the new things in ShadowProtect 4.0.1 in the ReadMe file, which you can check out online.

You can download a 30-day trial version of ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server or ShadowProtect Desktop from the ShadowProtect software trials Web page. You may also update your existing version of ShadowProtect from the ShadowProtect software updates page.

As always, if you need more information about a specific ShadowProtect product, you may visit one of the following product pages:

ShadowProtect Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectServer

ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectSBS

ShadowProtect Desktop™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectDesktop

ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectIME

Setting up a Network

2010-07-14T17:13:02Z

If you’ve ever thought about setting up a network at home or even been so ambitious as to set up a small office network, you know that it isn’t simple or straight forward. Getting everything running smoothly requires time, patience and several bottles of aspirin.

PC Magazine recently put together a how-to guide giving you some tips and tricks to make the process a little smoother. This guide explains the kind of storage to get and how to protect it.

You can set up your own local backup system given enough external storage space. If you’re going to take this course, we recommend creating not just a backup, but a whole drive image – that is, a backup of not just your data, but your entire PC – everything from your files to all the tweaks you make to your OS and apps so that they perform the way you want them to. The best software for this, hands down, is ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0.

Check out the entire article and pick up a few pointers. You may even have some of your own that the article doesn’t highlight. You can always share them here and give others the benefit of your wisdom and experience.