Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 for SMBs
Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 for SMBs
May 17, 2007: To coincide with the release of Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0, Symantec conducted a study on the backup practices of 400 SMB organisations in Australian and New Zealand.
The research shows that while small and medium businesses mostly follow best practice for back up, budget and resource constraints compromise the strength of recovery processes.
The problem for SMBs in Australia and New Zealand is a lack of dedicated resources for the protection of business information. Symantec’s survey found that 90 percent of the 400 SMB organisations interviewed were at least backing up once per week; 77 percent were doing that daily, potentially leaving roughly 20% exposed to industry and state specific records retention legislation. On the restore side, 40 percent of respondents reported the need to restore at least once a month.
The problem with information management and protection for many SMBs is a lack of resources and the complexity involved in restoring systems and files. The survey found the responsibility for IT issues is likely left to business managers or shared between a several employees (only 36 percent reported having dedicated IT staff), leaving it as a potential weak point in the organisation.
With most businesses aware of the need to backup information regularly, the critical factor being addressed by version 7.0 is recovery. Symantec promises greater ease in managing recovery processes for the operating system, applications, system settings, user settings, and data. Backup Exec captures an image of the system so that if systems fail, administrators can select the recovery point to restore from and Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery restores the complete system.
The recovery points can be a NAS/SAN device, I/SCSCI, SATA, ATA device, USB device, flash memory or CD/DVD.
A new Exchange Retrieve Option simplifies Exchange recovery, enabling the recovery of the Exchange server as well as individual messages, attachments, folders, and mailboxes.
Users of Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery can also recover their own files and folders using similar search and retrieve capability to Google Desktop. Users are also able to protect select files and folders by running a local file and folder protection schema in addition to the volume-based recovery point process. This includes support for versioning so customers can keep multiple versions of the same file containing the various changes in time that they wish to restore.
Version 7.0 also allows conversion of physical recovery points to virtual formats (P2V) as well as conversion of virtual systems back to physical environments (V2P) for VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, and Microsoft Virtual Server.