How to restore a file with StorageCraft ShadowProtect

I've installed ShadowProtect on most of my clients' servers - it's a great product and if you're not using it for backups, then seriously consider it. One of our sub-contractors emailed me with some issues on restoring files so I thought I'd add my reply to him here as a quick cheat sheet:

• Log onto the server you need to restore the file from
• Open up the share where your backups are going
• Browse through the list of files and look for an .cd or .cw or .cm file around the correct date
• -cd.spi is a consolidated daily
• -cw.spi is a consolidated weekly
• -cm.spi is a consolidated monthly
• for a full listing see here: http://bit.ly/1mNLBps
• once you've found the correct file, right click on it and choose ShadowProtect Mount
• pick the defaults, except when it comes to the right date - the consolidated files have a list of possible days / weeks that you can choose - find the right one and click on it, then go Next
• mount the file as read-only unless you need read-write access
• the computer will mount the drive as a new drive letter
• browse through that drive until you find the file you want to restore, then copy and paste it to the right location and that's it
• unmount the backup image and all finished! 

It's important to note this is only one of two ways of doing it. You can use the wizard that is part of ShadowProtect and it's even easier. At the time I was in a hurry and had to find multiple awful files so I used this method, plus I find that I use this method for Granular Recovery for Exchange restores.

Adventures in backups and restores - StorageCraft Shadow Protect

After taking a new client over recently I have been working with StorageCraft's Shadow Protect backup solution for servers: http://www.storagecraft.com.au/  Initially I was just checking that the damn thing was backing stuff up to somewhere and trying to work through a multitude of other issues. Since these problems have settled down I've had more leisure to examine this product. 

The server solution has a wide range of backup capabilities - full backups, incremental backups and continuous incremental backups. The incremental backups can be performed every 15 minutes and up from there. These are keyed back to an initial full backup of the server and are a sector by sector backup. This means we can mount the backup image as the next free drive on the server. One can simply copy across the lost files and then dismount the backup. It's elegant, simple and works well. There is a very nice extension to this as well - the Granular Recovery for Exchange. When needing to recover a email, a folder or an entire mailbox, the ShadowProtect GRE makes it very easy. Simply mount the backup image of the drive with the Exchange database on it, tell GRE where it is, where the existing Exchange database is and then copy across the items you need to recover. It's awesome because of it's ease and speed, search functions and also as a means of migrating to a newer version of Exchange. The few times I've used this it absolutely blew me away with it's ease of use, speed and simplification of data recovery. 

ShadowProtect uses ShadowControl ImageManager software to help manage all the images and snapshots. It's another neat bit of kit and it's functionality is excellent.

The most impressive part of this backup solution is the ability it has to virtual boot a server from an image. You can boot it as an Oracle VirtualBox virtual machine, or as a HyperV VM. A failed physical server can be up and running in minutes as a virtual server. It will still be running backups as per the physical server and once the hardware is restored, the up to date virtual server can be restored back to the physical hardware and once again full services can be restored.

As with any software though it needs to be carefully set up and configured, with usual ongoing maintenance applied. The install I'm working on currently is a bit of a mess and there are a lot of images that need to be sorted out. As a backup solution it also ties in with the virtual environment, although this is something I'm still exploring - check StorageCraft's ShadowProtect out, it's well worth a look.