Snapshots undo virus damage

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January 4, 2005 (Storage Networking World) -- About a year ago, Wayne Genereux, director of IT at the Bristol County Sheriff's Office in Massachusetts, concluded that he couldn't afford to depend on tape backups for data protection anymore. To be more secure, he installed FilesX's Xpress Restore and Xchange Restore as a second line of defense.
A few months ago, when a virus took out the Exchange server at the county sheriff's office, he was very glad he had.
A Microsoft shop, the organization maintains about 250GB of data on an HP DL380 ProLiant server's internal storage drives. The IT staff had been doing nightly tape backups using Veritas' Backup ExecT. The tapes were then used to restore data after disk crashes, to migrate data from problematic drives and to ensure that nothing crucial got lost during an Exchange upgrade. However, as a primary means of disaster recovery, the setup had serious drawbacks, Genereux says.
Because it is a 24/7 facility, the sheriff's office can't afford to lose more than an hour or two's worth of data, particularly for crucial systems such as inmate tracking. Nightly tape backups left much too big of a data loss window. "If we had a disk crash in the afternoon, we'd lose everything that got created since that morning," Genereux says.
Another issue was the length of time needed to restore data, particularly if only a single file or directory needed to be recovered, Genereux says. "If a disk is corrupted, it requires rebuilding the entire Exchange database to restore the data, and that's a complicated process."
On top of that, tape backups weren't 100% reliable, since files occasionally didn't make it to tape. Taking all these drawbacks together, it became clear that the agency needed to come up with a more effective data protection strategy.

Making the move to FilesX
In the fall of 2003, the IT staff implemented FilesX's Xpress Restore and Xchange Restore as a primary data protection system for all applications used on a daily basis. This includes e-mail, file and print services, payroll and -- most important -- inmate tracking.
The sheriff's office chose FilesX on the recommendation of a third-party vendor that was familiar with both the product and Bristol County's needs. Genereux didn't consider implementing data protection technologies such as replication or disk mirroring, which can support close to instantaneous recovery with little or no data loss, since the office didn't require it.
FilesX client software sits on all of the sheriff's office's Windows 2003 servers and takes periodic copies, or snapshots, of data images. The software can be programmed to take snapshots at different time intervals, depending on the criticality of a given

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