When the secretary at Te Puke High School lost her entire email store, a major disruption was caused, costing the Western Bay of Plenty school unnecessary resources and headaches.
Straight after the incident, IT manager Clint Besseling ordered recovery software for emails and mailboxes. The new software, StorageCraft ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE), had been recommended to him independently by his supplier and a consulting IT professional.
GRE is a disk-based backup and recovery solution that recovers email messages literally in minutes. Elsewhere this process typically takes hours.
In the two months that he has been using GRE, Clint has been called on to restore multiple email messages. He has also recovered complete email data files, which he has exported to PST files. All the restores have been completed quickly and easily.
Initially he mapped the school’s network drive and now GRE takes regular images of the email backup server. This is backed-up on average every three hours during the working day. If Clint needs to restore an email message, he simply points GRE to relevant files in the Exchange database, and very quickly mounts and recovers the missing email(s).
“On average the recovery process takes about five minutes,” he says. “I have never seen a product that works as well as ShadowProtect. It’s the sort of technology I would recommend to other New Zealand schools for backing up email servers, which is usually a slow and difficult process. It has made a huge difference to our efficiency,” he says.
Microsoft Exchange is one of the most popular email servers for organisations of all sizes, including schools and local authorities. However, according to StorageCraft’s vice-president Asia Pacific Greg Wyman, it is complex.
“It can be an extremely difficult and frustrating job to recover individual mailboxes and email messages. Our clients use ShadowProtect GRE to be confident that they can access any email data that has been deleted in error or lost due to a server crash, fire or natural disasters. Critical data is restored within minutes instead of hours or days, and business activity can continue without major interruptions,” he adds.
Using point-in-time backup images of an Exchange server, IT administrators can use GRE to access the Exchange EDB backup file contained in the backup image, navigate to the desired email files – whether it is entire mailboxes, individual email messages or email attachments – then drag and drop the needed files to a production Exchange server or save them to a PST file.
Greg Wyman says the transition from backup to real-time recovery technology will resolve data-loss issues that occur in public institutions in the long term. In 2010, about 20 per cent of all the data lost worldwide happened in Government organisations¹ and most of those losses occurred when agencies failed to recover information after server crashes. Although most have procedures in place, many still rely on tape-based backup technology, which no longer offers the recoverability levels now being mandated.
In recent years, a new technology called real-time recovery (RTR) has emerged, which focuses on recovering data, databases and even complete systems. RTR can recover data in real time in seconds, and complete servers in minutes rather than hours or days, as well as performing ultra-fast and reliable backups. Currently, the market is transitioning rapidly from tape to disk, to fourth-generation real-time recovery solutions that deliver disk-to-disk-to-offsite archival (disk, tape or even cloud). As a result, tape is being relegated to long-term offsite archival of data, rather than real-time backups.
A local authority needs to consider certain key issues: the recovery time objective (RTO), which is the time it takes to rebuild a system or resume operations – it should take less than three minutes; the recovery point objective (RPO) – how far back in time they must go to restore a ‘clean’ data set – they need never lose more than 15 minutes of data; and the affordability and complexity of the solution. For best practice, the faster the RTO, the less RPO, the more affordable and less complex the solution, the better the value it delivers.
RTR integrates seamlessly into a council’s backup process, and for many local authorities whose offices and libraries are connected by fibre, RTR facilitates an affordable remote disaster recovery centre using existing internal infrastructure.
¹ Statistics from KPMG.