Big Sur Shadow Protect Managed Backup - Desktop Overview

Get Fast, Reliable Backups and Disaster Recovery for Windows Desktops and Laptops

Big Sur Managed StorageCraft Desktop Backup (Local Only) $10.00/Month

What is StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop, and who should use it?

StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® Desktop software provides fast, reliable backups and disaster recovery as well as data protection for Windows workstations. Regardless of whether a business is a large enterprise, a small firm, or somewhere in between, protecting employees’ personal computers is critical. If you oversee IT infrastructure at a business or offer IT services to clients, ShadowProtect Desktop software can help you recover data and get laptops and desktops running again when disaster strikes.

ShadowProtect Desktop is one part of the StorageCraft Recover-Ability™ solution. This solution provides you with the products and services necessary to recover your Windows IT environment anytime and anywhere, and from any disaster, great or small.

ShadowProtect Desktop software creates sector-level backup images of a disk drive. A sector-level backup image is a point-in-time representation of a disk drive and therefore includes not just data but also the operating system, applications, services, and configuration settings. Because your backup image contains everything on a given laptop or desktop, when you need to recover its entire hard drive, you can do so in minutes rather than hours or days.

Include desktops and laptops in your disaster recovery planning

These days, so much business-critical data gets saved on personal computers that losing them to malware, viruses, physical damage, or theft can be catastrophic for your business—that critical data disappears, and worker productivity takes a severe hit. Thus, protecting laptops and desktops is crucial to business operations.

Many businesses and organizations now prioritize having a backup and disaster recovery plan for their laptop and desktop computers. ShadowProtect Desktop is an integral part of any such plan—it doesn’t just provide full backups of computer drives, it also features flexible recovery options that enable workers to get up and running fast after a disaster.

When data loss or system failure occurs, ShadowProtect lets you:

Access individual data files and folders in seconds
Restore to the same or different machine in a matter of minutes
Boot a backup image as a virtual machine for a quick, temporary fix

And to ensure workers never lose more than a few minutes’ worth of data, you can schedule ShadowProtect Desktop software to continually take incremental backup images (these images record just the changes since the last backup image). ShadowProtect works in the background while the computer is running—users won’t even notice backups occurring.

Vital protection of your Windows workstations

Common scenarios for which businesses use ShadowProtect Desktop:

Recovering data such as files and folders
Performing bare metal recovery after a computer dies or is stolen
Restoring to the same hardware after malware or a virus causes a crash
Migrating to new Windows desktops or laptops
Testing new applications prior to introducing them into your production environment
Testing your business’s disaster recovery plan

Features and benefits of ShadowProtect Desktop

Backup

The Backup Wizard enables you to:

Capture everything—systems, applications, configuration settings, services, data—from your desktop or laptop
Encrypt backup image jobs to securely protect data
Save backups to any disk device (such as removable, local, and network drives) or any optical media (CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs)
Back up a non-bootable system before attempting a restore operation (using StorageCraft Recovery Environment)

Scheduling

The Backup Wizard also lets you:

Execute a one-time full backup that you can archive
Schedule backups to occur automatically
Schedule incremental backups to run as often as every 15 minutes
Set up subsequent full backups to be differential to save on storage space
Manage the retention of backup images

Remote Management

Management view and client/agent options enable you to:

Install the ShadowProtect agent on a desktop without having to visit the machine
Remotely manage ShadowProtect Desktop nodes
Choose to receive notification when desktop backup jobs succeed or fail

Testing

With the Verify Image tool, StorageCraft ImageReady™ technology, and StorageCraft VirtualBoot™ technology, you can:

Verify backup images to ensure they’re in a known good state for fast and reliable recovery
Automatically run Chkdsk or other scripts on mounted volumes to determine data and application integrity
Mount an Exchange Server backup (including system, data, and log volumes) to test the .EDB files and verify they’re intact or run cleanup if they’re in a dirty shutdown state
Boot a backup image to a virtual machine to test whether a restored system would function properly

Image Management

With the Image Conversion Tool, you can:

Consolidate files (full backup plus incrementals) into a single new backup image for archiving
Split a backup image file into smaller files (a spanned set) for backup on DVD or Blu-Ray
Convert backup image files to a virtual disk in either .VHD (Hyper-V-compatible) or .VMDK (VMware-compatible) format for restoration or migration to a VM
Set a consolidated or converted backup file’s compression setting or encryption

Recovery

The Restore Wizard, Explore Backup Wizard, StorageCraft VirtualBoot™ technology, and StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore™ technology let you:

Perform a bare metal restore in minutes
Restore a system to the same or different hardware or to virtual environments
Mount a backup image quickly and browse it in order to recover a file or folder
Quickly restore access to a database server by mounting a point-in-time backup image
Rapidly boot a backup image as a virtual machine (temporary system failover)