Intelligent disaster recovery

[JayE]

Hi,

With the release of version 9.0, has Veritas finally introduced Intelligent Disaster Recovery for SBS 2000?

I've been told they've been working on this problem for years ... wondering if the wait is finally over, or how much longer it will be.

If IDS is not available, how easy it it to recover a SBS 2000 server from a disaster (eg. flood, theft where you have to replace the unit). We have full daily backups.

I'd also like to know how easy it is to recover individual user files from a backup (say if files are accidentally deleted or get corrupted)? I'm currently using Stac Replica for Windows NT, and finding it a real pain. Part of the program is that the display of volumes doesn't displays a whole list of past backups - the current one plus about 6 ones going back to 1999 !! It's very hard to see the one which actually relates to the media in the drive. Would I have this problem in Backup Exec? Also, it takes a long time to "mount" the backup disc as a separate disk volume called G before you can restore files. How does Backup Exec do it? What about restoring items accidentally deleted from a public folder in Outlook 2000 (Exchange 5.5)?

I do hope you can help me.

Regards,
Jay/UK

 

[Jonmonster]

As far as SBS 2000 is concerned, yes they do support it now. Here is what I found.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/238607.htm

As far as ease of use, it should be just as easy to recover an SBS from a disaster as it is for anything else. The only caveat there, of course would probably be the Exchange portion which might need to be manually restored from Backup Exec after the disaster recovery completes in order to get your mailboxes back. I'm not exactly sure because I've never done an SBS IDR before.

But I emphasize, as I did in a previous IDR post, don't go by what I'm telling you alone. I'm a big believer in testing a product before jumping into a production environment with it, especially when it comes to something like DR. The leap of faith of installing it and hoping that it just "works" when you need it is just too great. 9.0 now allows you to test IDR with an eval. I highly recommend you take advantage of this for yourself. If you have a spare system lying around somewhere, install SBS 2K and 9.0 Eval on it then blow the system away before you IDR it. Make that system as close to your production server as possible.

And Finally as far as the rest of your questions are concerned, I think Backup Exec is really easy to use but I've never used Stac Replica so I don't think it would be possible to give you an unbiased answer except to say that you should probably evaluate it for yourself and compare the two.

I hope this helped.

-J