Making Backup Easier with Intelligent Backup
Have you ever seen pictures of the control room in a power generation plant? It’s an entire wall of dials, knobs, and gauges, all telling you important bits of information about the system. That’s great – and probably necessary! – if your only job was to manage that power plant. But as an IT professional, you have lots of daily jobs; some of you manage Exchange, SQL Server, firewalls, security, storage, servers, you name it. Backup and recovery might be only one of the many jobs you do on a daily basis. And here at Symantec, we don’t want your backup application to be like that power plant – we want you to be
able to sit down, do what you need to do, and get on with your day.
Backup Exec has an entirely new user interface. You’re going to like it – it’s simpler, more intuitive, and much easier to navigate. We’ve also taken a lot of time to keep all those great features you are used to in previous versions of Backup
Exec – so this interface is going to appeal to the new Backup Exec user and the seasoned professional. At-a-glance status is easily available in Backup Exec 2012, both from servers you are protecting and from the storage you are using to store your backups. The latest version of Backup Exec is just a cleaner, more intuitive way to manage your backup and recovery environment.
We’ve also included a new way to create and manage backup jobs and policies. No longer do you need an advanced degree in Data Protection to set up disk-to-disk-to-tape backups or replicate data between sites – the new Backup Stages feature shows you, in graphical detail, how your backup data will be transferred, when it will be backed up, and where it’s going to be transferred to.
Speaking of backups, how many of you just want to create backups to protect your critical servers and applications without any headaches? How many of you would rather not pore over every detail of application backups? Well, if that sounds like you, Backup Exec has made it much easier for you to set up backup jobs, because we have included some seriously intelligent defaults – based off our own expertise in data protection and by taking the most successful backup configurations from
our customers and partners – and building them into Backup Exec. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of backup job creation, however, Backup Exec has all the same great features and customizability you have used before – so you have the right tools to get the job done.
With Backup Exec, we’ve also stepped up our “telemetry” program – gathering non-personally identifiable information from our customers and partners who choose to participate in the program. This gives us invaluable intelligence about how backups and restores are working in the field, and we have used that information extensively to make Backup Exec the easiest to use, full-featured data protection application for physical or virtual environments on the market.
Be one of the first to find out what other new ground breaking backup and recovery features are coming soon in Backup Exec.
Visit the Countdown to Better Backup web site here: http://bit.ly/yenx3z
By Aidan Finley … Symantec’s Aidan Finley talks about simplifying intelligent backup: http://bit.ly/vHJXoa #BetterBackup [Video]
Backup Exec 12.5 Granular Recovery
One of the really cool functions of BE is the Granular Recovery Technology (GRT). By the way, anytime you need more information on any aspect of BE please see the Backup Exec for Windows Servers Administrator’s Guide. In fact, don’t take my word for it, download from here:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/308400.htm
Just a few tips to help you get the best out of BE’s GRT:
- Review the requirements for staging locations in the Administrator’s Guide.
- You must use a staging location for GRT-enabled jobs in the following scenarios:
- You back up to or restore from a volume with file size limitations.
- You restore granular items from tape.
- You run an off-host backup job.
- You are better off creating a separate backup-to-disk folder specifically for all GRT enabled backup jobs – this really simplifies media management. You will need to manage the IMG media that GRT enabled jobs create differently than other backup-to-disk media.
- Don’t allocate a maximum size for backup-to-disk files. If you do then you are in danger of getting failed jobs because of low disk space. This is because the backup-to-disk file often occupies extra space since GRT information is stored in IMG media and Backup Exec will only create a backup-to-disk file that is as large as the size that you specified.
- If you are using frequent incremental GRT enabled jobs it is a really good idea to run a full GRT enabled backup job every so often. This is because each incremental GRT enabled job requires a small amount of internal storage. If this storage amount increases too much, it can affect system resources. When you run the full GRT enabled backup job, you make available the storage space that has accumulated from incremental jobs.
12.5 delivers GRT for Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint Server, and SharePoint Services which gives you the ability to recover granular data quickly and efficiently from a single-pass backup. It means, for example, that you do not have to run Exchange mailbox backups to recover granular data, including documents, list items and user attributes, or properties.
