Future BE Feature Requests

[kyle_beckham]

Is there a place to submit feature requests for BE? 

We have been backing up several large servers with lots of files that are changing daily.  We currently use the advance disk backup to assist with this task taking fulls and incrementals etc.  We have seen alot of the newer backup software do disk (block based backups) of the servers disk partitions. In addition these newer the system dont just backup the entire disk on every backup, they are smart and use change block tracking and only backup the blocks that have changed thus increasing the backup times once a full disk backup has been completed.   With this when we need to do a restore of a file or folder we can mount the selected backup and grab only the needed files we need. We do not have to restore the entire server.    I dont think the system recovery allows for this type of file level restores.

Thanks,

[teiva-boy]

There is an "ideas," section in this forum, you can post in.  

It's true though, that other products, even NetBackup have features that BackupExec doesn't get.  It is the SMB product, so it makes sense to artifically restrict certain things or delay them...

You could try the "Change Journal option," within the policy settings.  There should be some speed up there.  

Also if you use an OST device from DataDomain, there is a clcient direct feature that allows dedupe to happen on the client and write directly to the DataDomain system, bypassing the media server.

[pkh]

What you are describing about backing up only changed blocks is a feature of the dedup option.

You can restore a single file from your differential/incremental backup.  Since you are on BE 2012, restore is now much easier.  Even without ADBO, BE 2012 will restore the backup chain once you specify the point-in-time that you want to restore to.  See this blog.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/simplified-restore-workflow-be-2012

[kyle_beckham]

WIth the dedupe - is it backing up only the changes disk (drive blocks) rather than indiviual files.  File by file backups are of the old tech.  Backing up an entire full disk image and then only backing up the changed block is the way to go. Lets you restore the entire disk if needed. Or selected files.

[pkh]

Dedup deduplicates individual files.

If you are backing up VMware VM's with changed block tracking on, then BE will back up just the changed blocks and you don't need the dedup option to do so.