Here is how we use the separate products together:
Once per week we capture a disaster recovery image of all our servers with BESR. The images are stored on an external drive enclosure(RAID enabled) and also copied to external USB drives for offsite storage. Daily backups are also taken with Backup Exec for Windows. We run a few different backup jobs with BEWS. Most jobs store to .BKF files on an external drive enclosure(also RAID enabled) while other jobs write to tape. Most of the file/folder, Mailbox item recovery and SQL item recovery is done within BEWS since their specific agents make granular recovery much easier.
In the event that a server dies and needs disaster recovery, the lab tested an verified plan is:
- Boot the replacement server, or same server with new drives with the BESR SRD
- Restore the most recent disaster recovery image to the server
- Use BEWS to restore the files/folders/databases to the most recently backedup versions. Since most of our backups are on .BKF files, the process goes quickly.
The kick in the pants is that you buy a disaster recovery solution and hope you never have to use it. However, Mr Murphy will eventuall come by for an unannounced visit. Mr Murphy paid us a visit one time while I was 50 miles away. Being an ungracious guest, he took down the array that holds our Exchange databases. I was able to remote connect into the server and rebuild the array and restore the data. The RAID array containing the OS was still operational, so I didn't need the SRD. However, I could have done this as a Lights Out restore if needed.