Software provides Windows safety net

StorageCraft Technology last week introduced software that lets administrators recover Windows servers, desktops and laptops from the ground up.

ShadowProtect is installed on each system being backed up and can be used to create an image of a system's applications, operating system and configuration settings on a disk drive, which then can be used to recover a damaged computer. This sort of recovery is sometimes called bare-metal recovery.

ShadowProtect backs up FAT, FAT32 and Windows NT File System volumes and is aware of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services. StorageCraft's products use encryption to protect images and compression to save space on disk drives. The software can be scheduled to perform full or incremental backups.

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StorageCraft Technology last week introduced software that lets administrators recover Windows servers, desktops and laptops from the ground up.

ShadowProtect is installed on each system being backed up and can be used to create an image of a system's applications, operating system and configuration settings on a disk drive, which then can be used to recover a damaged computer. This sort of recovery is sometimes called bare-metal recovery.

ShadowProtect backs up FAT, FAT32 and Windows NT File System volumes and is aware of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services. StorageCraft's products use encryption to protect images and compression to save space on disk drives. The software can be scheduled to perform full or incremental backups.

Zane Colby, president of Networkz, has used an earlier version of ShadowProtect designed for consultants and other IT providers. "There was a time when a domain controller failed, and I was able to create an image of the domain and connect users to it so they would have access to the network," he says.

IT could use ShadowProtect to protect a server before applying patches: "If you wanted to test something or change something in the environment you could," Colby says. "If it failed, you could use the image to go back to where you originally were."

ShadowProtect can be compared with Symantec's LiveState Recovery and Acronis' TruImage.

ShadowProtect Desktop Edition costs $70 per desktop or laptop.

Click to see: Protecting Windows graphic

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.