Cyber ​​Backup as a multitool for various IT tasks

Backup

This is the most obvious scenario. What can a backup system be used for? For backup, of course! Files, folders, volumes, disks, entire machines, databases, mailboxes – whatever. If you have a need to store an archive of any data, our product will cope with this task perfectly.

Let's skip backup and immediately move on to not the most standard, but vital scenarios for using Cyber ​​Backup.

Cloning

From a machine backup, you can restore a clone of the machine to replace the lost one. Or you can restore it a second time, side by side, into a similar chassis (or even not into a similar one), and get two identical cars! Thus, the IBS turns into a clone machine. I personally used this functionality many years ago, when there was a regular need to supply customers with N identical machines for office needs. The key word here is identical. We take one set of hardware, roll out the OS, set it up, but don’t activate it yet, install the software, set it up too, then make a full backup of the machine and set it up for recovery on the second chassis, while in the meantime we drive in the license keys on the first one and do fine tuning, like unique network name. Time and effort are saved on an industrial scale: where previously a couple of engineers spent two or three working days, they can do it in one day, without straining too much. It is clear that there are more automated solutions with image deployment over the network and automatic configuration by scripts, but if you need to do such actions irregularly or “on your knees”, why not use an SRK instead of rolling out a cumbersome automatic deployment infrastructure?

Migration to new hardware

The next scenario for using Cyber ​​Backup is migration to new hardware. For example, it turned out that your favorite computer in the accounting department is obsolete, it would be nice to change the motherboard (and everything else along with it), but the user of this computer, accountant Zinaida Debetkreditovna, is so used to her wallpaper with cats and the organization of copies DBMS, it is impossible to force it to transfer to a brand new computer with a freshly installed operating system. There is a solution: we make a backup copy of the machine and restore it to new hardware. Recent operating systems of the Windows family have their own means of adapting to such situations, and for other OS versions our product includes a wonderful Universal Restore, which we wrote about in one of the previous articles.

Migration with unification

The scenario, in principle, is a generalized previous case: migration with unification. The company grew and developed, equipment was purchased on demand, but now the company is on the threshold of the Enterprise sector, and the computer park is a mess and a complete zoo of platforms and generations. We do everything the same as last time, but not for one workstation, but for the entire department, and – voila! – the department is standardized, spare parts are purchased in small wholesale at better offers, rather than one item at a time in a retail store.

Migration with virtualization

This scenario also in some way follows from the previous two, but the scale is slightly different and the plane has changed. Our hypothetical company is already growing into bold attempts: it was decided to transfer both servers and workstations to virtualization, the admin has already assembled a cluster, the nodes are rustling with difference disks… Shouldn’t we transfer all the workers to new “zero” machines? Connecting to the Matrix should be as friendly as possible, and our magical Cyber ​​Backup tool will again help us with this. After all, fearing problems with information loss, we installed our agent on each machine even earlier, set up a standard backup plan (of course, “whole machine” and “always incremental”!) and rolled it out to all agents. Backups are performed, slices are written to the archive, and we just need to take a ready-made backup copy for the last date and restore the state of the machine from it to any virtual machine we like. A little torment – and the entire office moved to virtual space without even noticing it.

Running a backup as a VM

This scenario cannot be called directly non-standard; this functionality is described even in our documentation, but many people forget about it. Suppose suddenly (and this always happens suddenly) a business-critical physical or virtual server, or some machine with Very Important Data, fails. The Chief System Administrator orders urgent delivery of replacement hardware from the supplier, junior Enikey workers are running around the ceiling, ready to grab the patch cords as soon as the replacement arrives… But business requires access to the lost service right now. This is where the ability to run a backup as a virtual machine (“Run as VM”, also called “instant recovery”) comes in handy. Just a couple of clicks, and a virtual image of the lost machine is launched directly from the archive, without wasting time preparing a new VM on the hypervisor. The downside of this pleasure is the limitation of the operation of such a machine. We recommend finalizing it into a standard VM in no more than 2-3 days. In fact, this is a tool for emergency access to data, but like everything emergency, it is a temporary measure. Avoid recycling such incomplete virtual machines to avoid filling the hypervisor system disk with difference partitions.

Support for import substitution

And finally, the issue of transition in the process of import substitution is quite relevant at the moment. Our hypothetical company used a good virtualization platform, but expensive and foreign, but now we need to switch to something native and domestic. You can again have “zero” machines, and let white-collar workers get used to them, there’s no need to be capricious here, or you can deploy previously obtained backups of workplaces on another virtualization platform, and in this case, our product acts as a universal migration tool, about By the way, we also already had a wonderful post.

Of course, everywhere there are pitfalls and their own characteristics – but where are they not? Of course, we have room to grow – and we are growing! With each release we add new and new functionality to our Cyber ​​Backup. Of course, we are still far from perfect, but the functionality already available is sufficient not only to perform basic backup functions, but also to complete some related tasks, as can be seen from this material. See you again!