Burchwords

Acronis has done it again. I’ve wrote about their past achievement with Universal Restore, now they have a software that will simplify backing up your Exchange server. It’s still in Beta phase, but looks very promising. If anyone is a beta tester for this product, I would love to know how it performs.

Here is their description of the product:

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that make it easy for anyone to create and implement a Disaster Recovery plan for their email, including:

Easy-to-use, centralized Management Console auto-discovers all Exchange Servers on your network, providing status and other information on disaster recovery progress from one central location.

Automatically create Disaster Recovery Plans that analyze your backup needs and present intuitive information to assist even non-administrators determine the best disaster recovery strategy.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that give you the flexibility in implementing your Disaster Recovery plan, including:

Flexible backup options enable you to choose whether you want to backup the entire database, specific users’ mailboxes, or mailboxes based on criteria you provide. For example, you can choose to create a “brick-level” mailbox backup for the company executives.

A full range of recovery options enable you to recover data from the last known archive, a particular point-in-time, or from the Exchange server’s point-of-failure.

Granular recovery helps you restore specific emails or mailboxes, regardless of whether you have backed up the entire Exchange database, or only created “brick-level” backups of specific information.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that give you unparalleled reliability in implementing your Disaster Recovery plan, including:

Exchange Dial-Tone support, giving you even more flexibility and reliability in backing up and restoring your Exchange database.

Flexible storage options let you choose where your archives are automatically copied, be it on a local hard drive, network share, FTP server, or other external device.

AES industry standard encryption protects your company’s most valuable data ensuring that your organization’s private information is safe and secure.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange will be available in April 2008, and will support Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, or later, running on Windows 2000 Server, or later.

I’ve been using Echo Workstation for about 2 weeks now. I just wanted to write about the pros and cons I’ve ran into. First, it doesn’t work well with vista. I don’t know if it just home versions of Vista or what. But it does work extremely well with windows 2000 and XP. I’ve had absolutely no problems out of these operating systems. Second, It seemed a little slow, but there is a fix for that.

I was using the build version 8017. After downloading it I went and registered the key and there was an update ready for me. After installing the update (build 8076) the backups were faster by a half an hour. It really improved performance. Acronis is staying on top of their game.

Universal Restore Option: I’ve got to admit this is the money maker. I can restore to a virtual machine or to a completely different machine with totally different hardware. Now, for XP you will have 3 days to re-register your activation key for windows. It sees all that new hardware and knows something is up.

I’ve restored 4 machines in my testing phase. Two XPs and Two 2ks machines. No problems so far. Just doesn’t work with Vista. If you need a backup solution I highly recommend you get Acronis Echo Workstation with the optional Universal Restore Software.  If you’re a IT guy like me being able to restore to different hardware or to a virtual machine is such a Blessing.

I give this a 4 out of 5 stars, just for not being about to backup my vista laptop. It could have had something to do with just my laptop, and not Acronis itself. Either way I still love this software.