The day the  Microsoft Exchange email server failed could have been the title of a horror story for North Queensland motor dealership Mike Carney Toyota, if a backup strategy had not been in place

Fortunately,  IT Manager Chris Candy had taken the precaution of implementing StorageCraft ShadowProtect real-time backup, recovery and disaster recovery solution with its Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE) option. 

Chris recalls: “If I had not done so, I could have spent the next few days restoring that corrupted server, which would have impacted on the company’s ability to conduct business effectively.”

In the event, ShadowProtect enabled him to have the Exchange server fully operational within an hour. Chris says it was “a terrific result and helped to deliver substantially better business continuity than our previous product used to deliver.”

Before installing  ShadowProtect Server edition Candy had to spend about 30 minutes looking for each lost file, as he needed to go to the company’s backup location, find the relevant tape, load it into the tape drive, index it and finally sift through until he found the required file.  Now he can restore required files in seconds using drag and drop procedures, and backups happen automatically as often as every 15 minutes instead of once a day.

ShadowProtect GRE complements ShadowProtect Server to provide a fast and easy recovery of individual exchange mail messages from a ShadowProtect backup. With those existing images, IT administrators can use GRE to access an Exchange EDB backup file contained in the backup image, navigate to the required email files – either entire mailboxes, individual email messages, or email attachments – then drag and drop the required data to a production Exchange server or save it as a .pst file.

Initially Chris bought ShadowProtect GRE to recover individual emails from mailboxes because the cost of the company’s previous tape-based email backup was too high.

Today he also uses ShadowProtect Server to back up all of Mike Carney Toyota’s main servers incrementally (ie only new files) every hour, ensuring that they can never lose more than 60 minutes’ business data or database transactions.

Before ShadowProtect, a tape backup of 450 GB took almost nine hours. ShadowProtect does the job in only 1 hour.  The StorageCraft solution also restores that data in an hour, compared to the 10 hours it took using tape backup systems.  Restoring a file takes only three minutes, compared to at least an hour using tape. 

In addition to realtime backup and recovery, Chris uses inbuilt migration capabilities with the included hardware independent restore (HIR) technology. He rolls out new servers in a three-year rotation of equipment. When he buys a batch of new servers, he takes a ShadowProtect image from one to put on the network, then tests that machine to make sure it’s perfect.  When he is satisfied, he rolls out the rest of the machines using that image.  If a server happens to crash or drop a hard drive, he can have the crashed server back up within an hour without major data loss – delivering true business continuity

Chris says: “ShadowProtect makes my job really easy and our IT department always look like heroes.”