CMS Products just announced the availability of their latest backup product: BounceBack Server. The software works just like their regular BounceBack offering; it makes a copy of your files to an external hard drive, which you can boot from in case of emergency.
For a full feature description check their product page; basically a list of features also found in their desktop product. The server version will set you back $285 and appears to be targeting the SMB segment, with support for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 R2.
Since the link to their full data sheet leads to a 404 error, the following may be incorrect; but from the description that is currently available the product appears to have some downsides:
- The “instant server recovery” is nice, but it requires starting from your backup drive. I’m not quite sure how that is better than investing in a RAID solution for your server. The only advantage I can think of is the ability to recover from manually deleting core OS files that make your server otherwise unbootable.
- The “instant recovery” and “one button restore” are not instant; you’ll still have to schedule downtime to restore the entire machine from the backups. Being able to run your server from the backup drive is nice, but there will still be significant downtime for the restore.
- Since you’re booting directly from the backup disk, you might face driver issues when you plug the backup drive into a different computer and try to boot there. You’d better make sure any spare hardware you plan to use in case of a server failure will be able to boot from the backup drive!
Then again, it might save you some time over the normal backup/restore feature in Windows 2008, and does offer encryption. Their marketing department thinks they have a rather revolutionary product:
“We believe that BounceBack Server is the first product which provides the opportunity for business continuity support in a small and medium size business environment. Small businesses depend on their computer operations to make their businesses successful, running everything from accounting records to point-of-sale transactions,” said Gary Streuter, vice president of marketing for CMS Products. “There are many SMBs operating without the benefit of automatic server recovery – and when a server fails, it can have a devastating effect on that small business. To that end, we have created a product that can save a small business owner from disaster should a computing failure occur.”
Related posts:
Your RSS reader
Daily e-mail
Twitter
