For Derek Kruger at the City of Safford, everything about his nightly backups had run amok.

“Our backup server was unable to complete a backup on all my critical Exchange, SQL and file servers in the off hours,” says Kruger, IT and Communications supervisor for Safford’s municipal government.

“I would back up Exchange one night and take two other nights to back up my file servers,” says Kruger. “I was having problems because if someone lost something or I had a catastrophic failure, the best I could do was go back a couple of days, unless I got lucky and it happened on the day of.”

Adding to his problems, he didn’t have the disk space to support all the backups he was doing.

“I had a situation where a file server became corrupt and we didn't notice it for about three days,” says Kruger. “By the time I did, we weren’t able to store enough backups -- we were only able to store two days of backups on our tape drive.”

Kruger said that with the backup software being used, “I couldn't save backups, I couldn't roll back far enough and I didn't have enough time to complete backups.”

Kruger, who had been using Symantec’s NetBackup, started looking for software that would let him meet his backup window, keep enough backups and recover data more granularly.

He found Asempra’s Business Continuity Server, which recovers Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and file server environments. With Asempra’s software, Kruger was able to recover data Safford employees from seconds not hours or days before. 

“We had a lady retire, and after two weeks she decided she could only bake so many chocolate chip cookies,” says Kruger. “She got a part-time job back at the library and I needed to restore her mailbox. It took me just two minutes to do it.”

Editor's note: Starting the week of Nov. 12, you will notice a number of enhancements to Network World newsletters that will provide you with more resources and more news links relevant to the newsletter's subject. Beginning Tuesday, Nov. 13, the Storage in the Enterprise Newsletter, written by Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor, will be merged with the Storage News Alert and will be named the Storage Alert. You'll get Deni's analysis of the storage market, which you will be able to read in full at NetworkWorld.com, plus links to the day's storage news and other relevant resources. This Alert will be mailed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We hope you will enjoy the enhancements and we thank you for reading Network World newsletters.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.