You can use this guide to find the Symantec recovery or backup product appropriate to your organization's needs.
Symantec System Recovery and Symantec Backup Exec are two families of applications designed to protect an organization's data from losses due to system failures.
Symantec System Recovery
Symantec System Recovery specializes in full backup and recovery of systems. If a disaster renders your servers completely inoperable, a Symantec System Recovery recovery point lets you restore the entire system quickly to:
- The same hardware configuration
- A different hardware setup
- A virtual appliance
Virtual appliance file formats supported include VMware's ESX, Microsoft's Hyper-V, and Citrix's XenServer.
In relying on sector-level backup and restoration, Symantec System Recovery resembles a disk imaging product such as Norton Ghost. However, it also provides several features of an advanced backup application, including restoration of individual files and folders from an image.
Backup Exec
In contrast to Symantec System Recovery, Backup Exec offers more advanced, powerful features. It is designed to meet the needs of organizations running complex enterprise applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory, SAP, and Oracle.
Backup Exec provides continuous data protection for Windows servers and workstations and for several other Microsoft applications, including SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and Active Directory.
Some backup programs have trouble capturing and backing up the precise current state of constantly changing, multi-user enterprise applications. With its numerous agents and options, Backup Exec facilitates the quick backup and restoration of these applications. The data stored in the applications changes frequently, and continuous data protection ensures that you always have the latest version of your data. You thus have less need for lots of regularly scheduled incremental backups.
Moreover, with the necessary system recovery agents installed, administrators or end users themselves can recover individual email messages and database records. This is especially handy because user error is a more common cause of data loss than catastrophic, complete-system failure.
Finally, compression and de-duplication options for Backup Exec will reduce the size of your backup files and make storage costs more manageable.
Backup Exec Small Business Edition
The Small Business Edition provides data protection to only one Windows Server, Windows Server Essentials, or Windows Small Business Server environment and two more remote servers, for Windows, Mac, or Linux. This edition is optimized for limited IT staff.
Backup Exec runs on and protects the same servers as Small Business Edition does and more. There is no limit on the number of servers it can protect.
Symantec Backup and Recovery Products Available Through TechSoup Asia
The following backup and recovery products are available through TechSoup Asia: