* Now Released * Symantec System Recovery 2013

[Andreas_Horlach]

IT organizations face hardware, software and database / application downtime, lasting short periods of time to shutting down the business for days on a regular basis. Without adequate planning and preparation, any type of downtime can compromise a return to operations and cause financial damage as the ability to generate revenue is lost. Most organizations anticipate that unplanned downtime can — and likely will — occur at some future time. But, in today's world, the need to ensure Web-enabled 24 x 7 x 365 access to key applications is paramount. Thus planning for operational continuity and recovery from outages is rapidly becoming an urgent priority for commercial and government entities alike.

New Symantec System Recovery 2013 - Generally Available Globally on 7th Jan 2013

I am delighted to announce that Symantec System Recovery 2013 is available from Monday 7th January 2013. Symantec System Recovery 2013 delivers superior backup and disaster recovery for servers, desktops, laptops, and virtual machines that enable businesses to recover from downtime or disasters in minutes. With patented Restore Anyware™ technology, IT administrators can rapidly restore exactly what they need, when and where they need it–including entire physical and virtual machines to bare metal or dissimilar hardware as well as files, folders, and granular application objects. Unlike other technologies, Symantec System Recovery also provides cross-platform Physical-to-Virtual (P2V), Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V), and Virtual to-Physical (V2P) recoveries, making it the perfect complement to physical and virtual environments.

The new and powerful features in this latest release further extend Symantec System Recovery leadership position in Disaster Recovery and Data Protection for all sizes of businesses. This new release includes support for the latest applications and operating systems, a new management solution for large scale deployments, and faster incremental backups in windows by up to 750%. 

Key new features in Symantec System Recovery 2013:

• Support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

• Support for VMware vSphere 5.0 and 5.1

• UEFI Support: Symantec System Recovery now enables boot from UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in addition to BIOS.

• 64 bit Support:  Full 64 bit support is now included.

• Advanced Monitoring and Reporting: Symantec System Recovery Monitor is a new monitoring solution that's extremely simple to use and is FREE of charge to all Symantec System Recovery 2013 customers. It's a standalone and lightweight solution for managing up to 100 nodes. It’s simplicity and no extra dependency eliminates the learning curve for users. Intuitive GUI along with essential action controls provide crisp status along with ability to take desired actions seamlessly through the same view.

• Smart Reconciliation:  Now Backups and reconciliation are efficiently done by smartly tracking changed blocks. The reconcile time is drastically reduced to seconds by eliminating the need to do a complete reconcile in cases of crashes or abrupt shutdowns. In addition,  incremental backups are now up to 750% faster.

                 - Incremental Backup without reconcile – At least 35% faster than Symantec System Recovery 2011

                 - Full Backup – At least 15% faster than Symantec System Recovery 2011

                 - Incremental Backup with reconcile – At least 750% faster than Symantec System Recovery 2011

• Updated Symantec System Recovery Linux Edition: The Symantec System Recovery Linux Edition now includes the ability to perform incremental backups and schedule backup jobs.

Try it Now FREE for 60 Days!

You can download the new version of Symantec System Recovery from Monday 7th Jan 2013 onwards by visiting: 

• Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Desktop Edition - https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=88749
• Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Small Business Server Edition - https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=88747
• Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Server Edition - https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=88724
• Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Linux Edition - https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=88752
• Symantec™ System Recovery 2013 Virtual Edition - https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer?a_id=88751

[STHN]

How about file and folder backup for the management solution? Is there any hope for that?

[criley]

Afraid not.

Please add your comments to the following:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/ideas/ssr-2011-management-file-backup

[mustard_man]

 how about de-dup on windows 8 ?

[criley]

As mentioned, there will be support for Windows 8 which includes the built-in dedupe feature.

Do you have any specific requirements here?

[SamWiseTx]

I hope it has a way monitor for OFFSITE copies. with Version 2011, i can;t know if the files transfered successfully to my offsite location.

[najmulhasan]

Any Support for clustered drives?As if a recovery point set job running on one mode,if moved to other will create a full recovery point..

[davidkillingswo]

100% agree.

[davidkillingswo]

Please for the love of all that is holy add SFTP support.  You currently offer FTP support, but who in the world uses just FTP anymore?

In fact, please add more protocols for offsite backup storage.

Ideally, all of my customers now want to backup to Amazon S3 for offsite backups.  This would be a perfect product for the Windows platform for SME/SMB if you offered Amazon S3 support.

[STHN]

SFTP support would definately increase confidence in a connected world.

[Marc_De_Scheppe]

*

[PDM-RED]

Hi Guys,

i would like to be able disable the way that SSR assigns unique names to external USB Drives.

ie: i would like a daily independent recovery point  (not initial recovery point) to go to g: (whether G: is a western digital passport or a mybook or even a large flashdrive , i just want the job to run and not care which device is connected) does anyone else share this pain? maybe also the option to overwrite this g: drive as opposed to having to "limit the number of recovery points to 1 and pray that 2 images of a laptop will fit on a passport drive before it is "deleted to comply with the number of recovery points".

OFFSITE does not work unless you have 10mb conection to the FTP/UNC server you are writing to which is simply not an option for SME's. and why cannot it not retry if it happens to lose connectivity, if I lose internet connectivity the ftp transfer handle it, the job fails meaning I lose a whole evening of offsite replication. ISP now sell online storage as SFTP so this is simple a prerequitise for SSR2013 Amazon S3 would be a dream come true.

The email alerts could use some more detail - ie: let me know how much data was backup up to give me peace of mind.

I have an empty partition d: drive, it does not need to be backed up so wy does SSR tell me I am at risk, I would like to be able to tell it which drives it needs to be concerned with.

I have never joined a forum before but this is an area I am spending a lot of time on currently looking at Evault, Backup exec 2012, Novastor, Azure, Acronis and I have been baby sitting a few SSR installs for the past 2 years hoping it would improve.

TOPTIP: run a daily independent backup to a cheap laptop bare disk in a cheap dropin bay like startech satdock25u connected a win7 workstation eg: \\machinename\e$ when you change the disk SSR wont know and you can backup to different media without modifiying your jobs. it works on XP workstations too but you have to restart the pc you can now take a complete image of all your servers home on a small laptop disk. Apologies for the long Post.

[Andreas_Horlach]

I appreciate your comments. Your points are well made and I invite others to share their feedback. They are all noted to product management. 

[gmradiator]

I see 64bit compatibility has been improved and I can't wait to try this out with custom recovery disks.

I note a few people complaining about the off-site backup options in SSR.

In my opinion, SSR's off-site options are never going to match that of a dedicated single purpose program designed to perform off-site sync'ing.

I use SSR to create the images, and incrementals. We then use AllwaySync (only around £20) to sync these to off-site locations. It also propogates deletions - ideal for when consolidating incrementals.

And it's compatible with most offsite backup facilities.

Sometimes it's not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

[criley]

maybe also the option to overwrite this g: drive as opposed to having to "limit the number of recovery points to 1 and pray that 2 images of a laptop will fit on a passport drive before it is "deleted to comply with the number of recovery points".

But what happens if the current backup fails? You have already removed the previous recovery point which leaves you with....nothing. Not a good position to be in. This is why you always need enough space for at least 2 recovery points.

I have an empty partition d: drive, it does not need to be backed up so wy does SSR tell me I am at risk, I would like to be able to tell it which drives it needs to be concerned with.

You can already do this. You just need to disable the reporting for this volume (go to Advanced/Customize Status Reporting).

[PDM-RED]

Dear Chris Riley - thank you for the Advanced/Customize Status Reporting tip - you have changed my life.

The 2 recovery points discussion is specifically for our roaming laptop users with 500gb plus CDrives and ony access to relatively expensive 1TB usb drives, I was comparing it to a tape scenario were you always overwrite your media. We backup critical laptop data to online storage so the imaging aspect is not required so regularly but its difficult to get road warriors to image their laptops. So on the rare chance that they finally do leave it plugged in it would be nice that the independant recovery thats always scheduled for 23:00 simply runs whether it has enough space or is at random one of the selection of usb drives that users happens to have on that day as long as its g: As it may be a while before the bother to leave their laptop connected and plugged into a drive. Ultimately I do agree with you. Cheers.

Does anyone else know of a clever replication tool like AllwaySync mentioned above or are we all praying SSR2013 will handle this aspect perfectly and to multile cloud vendors.. Regards to all, this is all very helpful.

[gmradiator]

Manually consolidating recovery points.

I prefer to do this manually, however if I select say 10 incrementals to delete, it prompts me to continue after EVERY incremental is removed.

Really, I should just click ok the first time, and it should remove all selected points without prompting individually.

It causes issues as some incrementals take a good half hour to remove and so I need to keep checking on the progress - which is an inefficient use of time.

Has this been corrected in the new version?

[John_Santana]

Yes please, I have been waiting to install the latest SSR which supports Windows 8.

WHat is the effect of installing SSR 2011 in Windows 8 ? can we do the upgrade later on ?

[criley]

WHat is the effect of installing SSR 2011 in Windows 8 ? can we do the upgrade later on ?

Don't do it - it's not supported. Whilst it *may* work, you wont get any support if you run into problems. SSR 2013 will be available early Jan 2013 so I would recommend you wait for this.

[John_Santana]

Cool, many thanks for the clarification Chris.