BackupAssist ER makes it easy to perform predictable and successful recoveries. A key reason for this is that all backups, both local and cloud, support bare-metal, granular and instant recoveries. This page provides guidance on what options to use to maintain cyber-resilience and minimize downtime.
Understand your requirements
Understanding the event that led to the recovery, and your expectations for that recovery, will help you make informed decisions. This section explains some key considerations so that you make the right choices and achieve predictable outcomes.
Identify your scenario
What caused your data loss or server outage will determine the type of recovery you should perform. The table below provides examples of traditional and modern threats, and the type of recoveries they require.
| Full system recovery (bare-metal) | Granular recovery (selected files) | |
|---|---|---|
| Data lost due to user error. | Yes. File or application recovery. | |
| Files needed for a legal request. | Yes. File or application recovery. | |
| Data lost due to hacking. | Yes. Malicious software may be present. | |
| Data lost due to a malicious user. | Yes. Malicious software may be present. | |
| Emails requested by HR | Yes. Exchange Granular Restore. | |
| Application database corrupted. | Yes. File or application recovery. | |
| Ransomware infection. | Yes | |
| Server loss due to natural disaster. | Yes |
Confirm your expectations
When performing a bare-metal recovery, consider how long you can wait for the recovery to finish. This will help you decide if you should perform a standard recovery or a VM Instant Boot recovery. Remember, a VM Instant Boot recovery is temporary and a full recovery will still be required. The table below provides some examples.
| Standard Recovery | VM Instant Boot | |
|---|---|---|
| Need a server operational within an hour because it has impacted your web store. | Yes | |
| Need a server operational in 6 hours. Support estimates it will take about 5 hours. | Decide if it is worth risking a time overrun | |
| The server can wait a day but the replacement hard drive will take 2 days to deliver. | Yes | |
| Your file server has a Windows failure and a recovery will take about 3 hours. | Yes. | |
| It is your only backup domain controller and you need it running again asap. | Yes | |
| The Exchange Server went down on a Saturday and you need it running by Monday. | Yes | |
| The SQL Server's database corruption means you cannot process orders. | Perform at end of the day | Yes |
Test your solution
Remember to regularly test your recovery options to ensure the process is understood and that your chosen backup strategy meets your expectations. The easiest way to a stress-free recovery of a critical system, is to have done it all before.
Choose the right recovery option
BackupAssist's set of recovery tools and features allow you to choose the recovery path that's right for you and your business. And with the guidance provided in the previous section, that recovery should be successful and predictable.
Get your server back online in minutes
If your server provides an essential service, each hour it's down can cost you money and reputation. To ensure you experience minimal downtime, any BackupAssist ER backup can be quickly virtualized using VM Instant Boot. All you need to do is follow our documented steps to make a BMR compatible local or cloud backup bootable, and then run that backup as a VM.
To learn more about these features and how to use them, see our VM Instant Boot and VM Instant Boot in the cloud pages.
Recover specific files or applications
Files and applications can be quickly and easily recovered using a local or cloud backup. In most cases, you would use the local backup because it's faster to recover from, and use the cloud backup if the local backup was unavailable or compromised in some way.
To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see our File or application recovery page.
Recover an Exchange mail box or individual mail items
Emails and calendars are important resources that require granular recovery options. In BackupAssist ER, this is provided by Exchange Granular Restore, a dedicated console that makes it easy to locate specific mail items from any backup of an Exchange Server, and recover those mail items to a user mailbox or a PST file.
To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see our Exchange Granular Restore page.
Recover a full server to bare metal
A full server recovery is often the easiest way to recover from a critical event such as a natural disaster, hardware failure or ransomware infection. This is also known as a bare-metal recovery and involves using a bootable media to start a server and open a recovery environment, which you then use to locate a backup and perform a recovery.
To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see our Bare-metal recovery page.
Recover a server using a cloud backup
There may be times when a local backup cannot be used in a bare-metal recovery. For example, if the local destination is unavailable or if the backup is infected with ransomware. Cloud backups are safely stored offline and provide a reliable recovery option if the local backup has been compromised.
To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see our Bare-metal recovery using a cloud backup page.
Recover data using a backup created by a different BackupAssist ER installation.
To ensure you have flexible recovery options, BackupAssist ER allows you to recover files and applications from backups created by another installation. This means if you have backups of servers that no longer use BackupAssist ER, or if a server that BackupAssist ER is installed on is no longer available, any other installation can locate those backups and use them in a recovery.
To learn more about this feature and how to use it, see our Recover using another installation's backup page.