When your server goes down, time is of the essence, and a few tricks can make all the difference. Use these techniques to shave hours or days off your data recovery time.
Bootable Backups
A bootable backup is a single USB HDD device containing both your backup media and boot media. When you make one of these, you’ve got an all-in-one data recovery device that you can just plug in and run in an emergency.
To learn how to make Bootable Backup Media with BackupAssist, read our System Protection guide.
Rapid VM Recovery
Rapid VM Recovery, also known as Instant VM Recovery, is a trick that allows you to instantly spin up a lost or damaged VM off your backup media. It basically ensures zero downtime, because you can continue using that VM while you’re performing a Full VM Recovery in the background.
Granular Restore
When you granularly restore something, you’re restoring just some select data from within a backup instead of the whole thing. This can include something like individual files, but in reality granular restore just means “anything smaller and within the backup”.
For example, a granular guest restore is when you’re just restoring data from within a few Hyper-V guest backups. Meanwhile, an Exchange granular restore might mean restoring individual emails, attachments, calendar or contact data. An SQL granular restore usually means individual databases.
In this light, it’s pretty easy to see why granular data recovery is so powerful – it allows you to reach into backups and just pluck out the data you need. This saves you a massive amount of time – instead you’d be restoring the whole backup somewhere and trying to copy over just a few things from that location.
Backup Search Tools
If you’ve got a fairly comprehensive backup software product, you should have access to a restore search tool. This tool allows you to scour your backups even if they’re not connected, so you don’t have to actually physically retrieve that backup to know what’s on it.
You can also get backup software with wildcard search functionality, which means you don’t need to know the name of what you’re searching for. This is an incredible time saver if you don’t exactly remember the details of the item you’re after, but you do know at least something. E.g. The date range it was backed up, created or modified, the file size, file type, or parts of the name.
If it’s a fairly advanced search function, you should also be able to search multiple backups at once, further lowering your data recovery time.
Cloud Backup
Having a cloud backup of vital business data can be a real time saver because it has high accessibility. So long as you can connect to the remote server, you can get access to that data for quick retrieval.
It also means you’ve got multiple levels of redundancy, so if your physical backups are compromised, you’ve still got your cloud backups as a backup (pun intended). Read more about having a complete backup strategy with BackupAssist.
