Backup and Recovery Tip: Stop Running Two Backups for Granular Recovery

May 26, 2015

Traditionally, backup and recovery procedures have required multiple agents and multiple backups. However, multiple backups lead to massive storage and time consumption, which can be a nightmare to manage. Fortunately, many Symantec Backup Agents offer Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) which lets you restore individual items from database backups. A separate backup of the individual items is not required for you to recover one item.

Granular recovery provides the ability to recover specific files in seconds from a single backup. This technology dramatically reduces the cost, recovery time, and the footprint of the backup on storage resources. With granular recovery, rather than having to restore an entire virtual machine or do a secondary redundant backup in order to recover a single file, administrators can retrieve a file directly out of a single backup and restore it back to a guest virtual machine.

There are many solutions available today that provide recovery agility through a single pass backup. For example, with Backup Exec and NetBackup you can recover anything from a single email, email box or the entire information store all from a single pass backup of your Microsoft Exchange Server. Forget multiple pass backups and save time, resources and storage.

Here are some best practices provided by Symantec that can help ensure the effective operation of Granular Recovery Technology:

• Back up your current or most recent GRT-enabled backup jobs to disk. It is more convenient to work with GRT-enabled jobs on the volumes that do not have file size limitations. You can create duplicate backup jobs and send copies of your backups to tape for archival purposes.
• Run a full GRT-enabled backup job periodically if your backup strategy uses frequent incremental GRT-enabled jobs. Each incremental job requires a small amount of internal storage. If this storage amount increases too much, it can negatively affect your system resources.
• Monitor your processor, disk, and memory usage if you experience any performance issues. Recovery and staging of GRT data may require more than the minimum system requirements, depending on the volume of data in the backup sets.
• Do not use software compression or encryption for GRT-enabled backup jobs. Enabling either software compression or encryption can result in degraded performance for GRT-enabled backup jobs.

 For more best practices on Granular Recovery Technology check out this article from Symantec: Best practices for Backup Exec 2014/15 Granular Recovery Technology

With Symantec’s Granular Recovery Technology, application data can be recovered in seconds. Did you know that Backup Exec (BUE) 2015 now supports granular recovery for VMware Virtual Machines volumes? Get more detailed information on Symantec Backup Exec (BUE) 2015 and learn how Dewpoint can help your organization today!