The newest version of ShadowProtect Desktop™ is now available. We announced the release of version 4.0 this morning, which includes some great new features.
You'll definitely want to check out VirtualBootTM. This allows you to right-click on a ShadowProtect backup image file and boot it as a virtual machine with Sun VirtualBox.
The software is free for individual use -- and free to try for enterprise use. Sun VirtualBox will let you boot the image as a .VHD or .VMDK. The whole process takes a couple of minutes. VirtualBoot is ideal for testing out new software or booting legacy systems to recover old files and documents. There are all kinds of potential uses for this invaluable tool.
There's also a new virtual converter in ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0 so you can completely convert ShadowProtect backup images into .VMDK or .VHD files when you decide to migrate to a virtual environment.
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It may seem a little cavalier to let slip that ShadowProtect is getting noticed again with another award, but we really do appreciate every award we win. This time, Programmer's Paradise gave ShadowProtect their "Riding the Crest" award, with top honors in the Virtualization: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery category.
"The Programmer's Paradise Riding the Crest Award to StorageCraft represents our customers' choice as to the best-of-breed solution for business continuity and disaster recovery of their virtualized environments," said Shawn Giordano, Vice President of Sales for Programmer's Paradise. "They clearly recognize ShadowProtect's value in minimizing downtime, improving business continuity and lowering their total cost of operations."
"Riding the Crest" winners are chosen based on customer feedback and annual sales. Programmer's Paradise has a complete list of 2009 Riding the Crest winners.
The truth is that hard drives fail. No one likes it, but technology is fragile -- more fragile than we'd like to admit. But there's an easy way to avoid the grief of a hard drive failure: back it up.
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Processor just published an article about StorageCraft and ShadowProtect called "Reliable Recovery." It includes and interview with StorageCraft Vice President of Product Management, Brandon Nordquist. The article looks at some of the company's plans for the future, and focuses on how well StorageCraft has done over the past year, even with a difficult economy.
"In a recession, with all of the doom-and-gloom news, people seem more aware that disasters can happen and are more on their toes in terms of backing up the corporate data," says Nordquist.
In the feature, Nordquist also talks about some future plans for ShadowProtect and the need for speedy recovery in the event of a disaster.
We live in a 24/7 world where you can't afford to lose any data. The beauty of buying backup software that lets you protect your data on a real-time basis - throughout the day - means that you won't lose that critical presentation you've just spent hours creating. Can you afford to lose that document, slide show or spreadsheet?
Most business backup takes place once a day, usually in the evening. But most employees are updating information throughout the day. If you lose that information, you've lost productivity. What's even worse, lost data can effect morale as well.
The solution is backup that updates throughout the day. And forget about recovering from a tape backup. A disk-based solution will help you restore in a few minutes, rather than hours. Plus, you can restore the entire system, if you need to - not just files and folders.
When you evaluate a solution, here are some things to consider:
How quickly can I perform a backup?
Will this backup solution allow me to restore from a specific point in time?
Can I recover quickly?
Is this solution only able to recover data? Can it also recover my entire system, if necessary?
The bottom line is to evaluate the solution that will be best for your bottom line.
You may think there isn't much you can do once a virus strikes. Updating security seems a little like locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, but it isn't necessarily so. Preventing the next attack is a good place to start.
Here are some steps you can take:
Put in reputable and reliable anti-virus software across your business. Then follow that up by always making sure virus definition files are updated for everyone.
Set up firewalls then test your servers to make sure they can handle all kinds of attacks.
Make sure you take the time to educate your users. Let them know the Web sites they visit -- even reputable ones -- might be infected. So they shouldn't download software unless they're sure it's safe.
Make sure you're backups continue to be up to date.
That last one is a great second line of defense. It's something you can do that proactively addresses the next possible attack. That's how your backup can be another kind of "anti-virus" tool. With a point-in-time solution like ShadowProtect, you can recover your server (or a desktop or laptop) to a known, good state before the attack took place. Plus, your backup should allow you to restore quickly, otherwise it's just as much a problem as the virus that took you down. If you have to wait while you restore terabytes of data, then that won't help business continuity much. You need a solution that can get you up and running in a matter of minutes, not hours.
The next time you're updating your anti-virus software or fine-tuning your firewall, consider that you might want to make sure you have a plan in place in case your first line of defense doesn't hold.
DRAPER, Utah, U.S.A. – Feb. 11, 2010 – StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a provider of innovative backup disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops, today announced it will offer competitive upgrade pricing to North American customers who choose to switch to StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™ or ShadowProtect Small Business Server™.
The special pricing discount applies to current users of the following products:
Symantec: Backup Exec, Live State Recovery and V2i Protector.
Acronis: True Image Echo Enterprise Server, True Image Echo Server for Windows, True Image Server for Windows, Backup and Recovery Advanced Server, Backup and Recovery Server for Windows and Backup and Recovery Advanced Server SBS Edition.
BakBone: NetVault software.
Computer Associates: ARCserve Backup or Disk Backup and Restore.
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If you're virtualizing your servers, systems and data, you may want to give some thought to how you plan to protect all that virtual information. Along with the lower cost and increased flexibility that virtualization brings, you will need to consider that your current backup system may not be capable of virtual backup and disaster recovery.
But the award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of disk-based backup and disaster recovery software can protect all of your virtual Windows systems. ShadowProtect Desktop, ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server and ShadowProtect IT Edition are very complementary with your virtual systems - such as VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server.
Whether you're backing up your systems on a regular schedule, converting to virtual systems or migrating to a new virtual server, ShadowProtect can help. It includes Hardware Independent Restore (H.I.R.) to allow you to convert physical machines to virtual machines (P2V), virtual to virtual (V2V) and virtual to physical.
There is a lot of information available to you if you're planning to use ShadowProtect with your virtual machines. Start at the StorageCraft Support Center, where you'll find a number of tools that will get you started protecting your virtual world. One example is a guide that will walk you step-by-step through a virtual machine restore. Plus, check out the ShadowProtect articles that show you how to conduct H.I.R. on your systems or the best ways to use VMware Converter or VMware Server to perform disaster recovery.
If you're looking for business continuity in a virtual world, just visit the support community and type the word "virtual" into the search box. You'll find a treasure trove of information there.
Sean Furman is fishing for a perfect blue fin tuna. When he’s not running his business, STF Consulting, Furman is out on the open water, usually more than 50 miles out in the ocean off the tip of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Very early in the morning on a recent Tuesday, he and his crew left the dock at Seabright, where he moors his 26-foot boat, Painless,and headed out to sea. They saw much more than tuna.
“There is a lot of life out there. There are dolphins whales everywhere,” says Furman. “They were so friendly, they’d come right up to the boat.”
During fishing season, Furman takes his boat out several times a month. He says he’s even arranged it so the birth of his first child doesn’t upset his fishing schedule. “I planned my child’s birth around fishing,” says Furman. “The baby is due in the off season so there’s no conflict with fishing and I can be 100 % focused on what my wife wants me to do.”
Until the baby arrives, Furman is in search of perfection. “I’m always looking for that trophy fish and I’m looking for trophy customers,” says Furman.
STF Consulting is a managed service provider (MSP) in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, offering IT services to businesses in the central part of the state. STF Consulting oversees approximately 100 servers and 550 workstations in 40 businesses in the area.
Furman says he is always looking for the best tools to round out his MSP offering for customers. He uses solutions like those from Level Platforms to monitor laptops to make sure all systems are “go” as well as the StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup, disaster recovery and migration software to keep his customers’ data available.
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Disk Improvements Increase Backup Capacity
Western Digital is touting new hard disk drive formatting that will save space. It’s something to consider as you’re looking at backup storage space. The new feature is called Advanced Format and Western Digital says it will give you 7-11% greater capacity on disk drives. Other drive manufacturers are expected to use Advanced Format to get more out of their hard drives as well.
This technique takes advantage of changes in the industry in drive sector sizes and consolidates overhead information to free up additional space for data storage. As a result of Advanced Format, a 1TB drive could potentially gain more than 100GB in capacity.
Regardless of the type of disk drive you choose, you can backup your data to that drive using StorageCraft ShadowProtect. ShadowProtect is disk-based technology that allows you to backup your systems and data on servers and PCs that are running Windows. With advancements in disk drives, and with the cost of disk space dropping all the time, backing up everything in your computing environment has never been easier or more affordable.
Plus, ShadowProtect backup software is designed so you can set it and forget it. You can schedule your backups as frequently as every 15 minutes, and schedule ShadowProtect to take full backups once a day or once a week and incremental backups of just the changes every other time. The new format techniques will make it easier than ever to ensure that you won’t run out of disk space for your backups any time soon.
