TechTip: 3 New Ways Image-based Recovery Gets You Out of a Jam

[Turls]

Servers are investments: They represent hours of installation, configuration, and patching.Those investments can be lost in an instant through a variety of failures. Restoring a server involves hours or days spent searching for disks and drivers, installing, and rebooting constantly.

The faster alternative is to use Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0. It can capture a disk image of Microsoft Windows-based servers or desktops—without disrupting application usage. That image provides a complete recovery point that can be used to restore a server or desktop in just minutes.

But Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery does more than recover systems fast. Here are three ways it can help IT teams out of predicaments:

1. Migrate a system to dissimilar hardware easily. Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery restores to similar or dissimilar hardware. When a system needs to be moved onto a bigger box or RAID controller, the task can be completed as much as 90% faster—while preserving the operating system, applications, databases, files, device drivers, profiles, settings, and registry.
   
   
2. Troubleshoot a production system without disruption. It's hard to get needed work done on production machines within the maintenance window. It's also risky—one mistake and a needed machine isn’t available, with all that implies. Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 can take a live image of a production machine and bring it up in a lab environment—on either a physical or virtual server. Virtual environments include VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
   
   You can test the server and make changes in the lab environment, then push the image back easily onto the production machine.
    
3. Roll back patches easily. Every patch or change needs a rollback strategy. Now one is easily available. Take an image of a server with Backup Exec System Recovery before a change, and restore the image to the same or different hardware if necessary.

Best of all, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery works with the backup solution you already have.