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LucyM@acronis.com Original article on Let's Talk Computers website
Making Regular Backups is Important And Why Knowing You Can Always Restore Them is Critical
Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton – Acronis Interview on Let’s Talk Computers Host Alan Ashendorf July 7, 2008 Alan: You’ve backed up your computer system on a regular schedule and you’ve made sure that all critical information is really backed up. And now you ask yourself, “Have I backed up everything that I need that is important to be protected?” But that’s not the question you should be asking. The real question you should be asking is, “In case I have a major disaster, am I 100% confident that I can restore all that critical information that I have backed up – and am I absolutely positive that I can get all my computer systems back up and running again?” Our guest today is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Stephen. Stephen: It’s always a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you so much. Alan: Stephen, last time we were talking about all the excuses that people have for not backing up the computer systems on a regular basis. It has to be fast; it has to be reliable; it has to be bulletproof. And even more so, it has to be extremely easy to do or they just don’t back up their computer system. But, you really stress why it is absolutely critical that you do back up your computer system on a regular basis in order to be protected. But now we want to restore. And to me, the restore is the proof of the pudding – because if we can’t restore what we backed up, we have nothing, do we? Stephen: It’s interesting you should say that because I talk to editors; I talk to resellers; to analysts; to users and they are constantly asking me about, “ backup, backup, and backup!” And one of the things I tell them is that backup is good, but it’s really not all that important. The important thing is – can you restore the backup you created? How sure are you that that backup that you made is actually valid? Again, that’s why we allow you to validate the image when you create it. But, we also let you validate the image before you restore it. But, let’s say you are saving images on a remote server or a network storage device, or even on an external USB drive and something happens to that image?
You want to make sure that that image is accurate before you restore it because you may end up introducing more problems than you had in the first place if you restore a bad image. With tape and with a lot of the competitive products, you simply don’t know if that image is any good. We allow you to check the image first – before you restore it.
Alan: Oh, that’ really important because we do data recovery here at Total Solutions and just recently, I had a gentleman that brought me a computer that had crashed, but he had an external USB drive that had backups on it. And I’m not going to say what brand of backups on it; all I am going to say is that it really didn’t really back up what he thought it backed up, but he was under the impression that it was backing up everything. And all it backed up was his documents and settings. And that doesn’t get everything back, does it? Stephen: No, it doesn’t. And that’s what you have to restore the operating system. You have to restore all of the applications; all of the configuration files; and all of the network settings. There’s a lot of work to do when you are restoring a system and all you have backed up are your documents and text files. Alan: A lot of the data was being restored under Program Directory or other directories that were not under Documents and Settings and he just about lost all of that. But, you have the ability to mount a backup, just as if it is a virtual hard drive and then I can see what I backed up. As a matter of fact, I can touch what I backed up and actually read it to verify to my satisfaction that – yep, it’s out there! Stephen: Not only that – you can mount that backup as either a “read only file or a read-write.” And let’s say you did create a backup yesterday. And let’s say you found out later on that, “My gosh, I have got a virus before I backed it up. But here, I have this great backup, but it’s got a virus on it!” You can now take that image and mount it as a “virtual disk,” then run your anti-virus software against that image; clean the image of the virus and then save it again and guess what? You now have the clean image for your backup. Alan: I’ve just made a backup and now I’m working on something that’s very critical and I want to back it up, but I don’t want to do another full backup, because I just did a backup. Can I just stuff it into the virtual backup? Stephen: You can take files; you can take folders; you can take whatever you want from your working machine and very simply add those files to your backup. And you do it simply by dragging and dropping. You would mount the backup as a virtual disk. For listeners who don’t know what a “virtual disk” is, basically, what you’re doing is taking that backup and giving it a letter that Microsoft Windows can recognize. So it becomes the letter hard disk on your machine. And if you a C: drive and a D: drive and E: is your CD/ROM or DVD, the virtual disk would become the F: drive, just simply because the next drive that’s available. You would then mount that virtual drive and you can simply drag and drop your file into your image. It makes it very, very simple. Alan: Stephen, on of the big things that I run into all the time is that people say, “Well, my computer system didn’t really ‘crash’. The hard ware didn’t crash on it. I just can’t boot the operating system or it’s ‘flaky’.” I hear that, all the time. “And what I need to do is I need to restore it, but I’ve got critical files on here after I did the backup and now if I restore it, I’m going to wipe out those critical files.” Stephen: That is an issue and for many years it’s been one of those things that users have looked at and said, “There’s no way around it.” Well, there is now. Acronis True Image allows you to identify specific files that you do not overwrite. You can identify those files that you have recently created. And when you restore the image, it will not overwrite those files. And now you’ve got again, the best of all worlds. You can restore your image, but you can still protect the important files that you’ve created that are not currently backed up anywhere else. Alan: Because, if you overwrite something that you’re working on right now, then it’s, “Well, I’ll just live with the flaky machine until I can get to a point where I do another backup.” Well, you don’t have to do that anymore; you just basically restore it, but don’t restore that part of it. Stephen: That’s right. People ask, “What makes your Product so different from plethora backups out there?” Certainly – “ease of use.” - The ability to not copy over your important files. These are all key differentiators. Anybody that has used some of the other products on the market, you will understand just how complex some backup products are. You know, there are some backup products out there that you have to go to school and take some 3-days of classes to learn just how to use them? Alan: I’ve attended some of those schools. This is not for the faint of heart! Stephen: It’s really tough to use some of those products. There is so much detail. There is so much configuration. If you have a small business and you are using one of these other products, certainly they are quite powerful, but the question is, “Do you need to send out a tank to swat a fly?” There is no reason that you need to use these incredibly complex products to protect the most critical data that you could possibly have in your small to mid-sized business. Alan: When you’re backing up – I know backing up to a network is just a hard drive on a network. But what other types of backup storage mediums can we use and can we use tapes? Stephen: You can certainly use tapes. You can use the USB connected drive. You can use DVD’s or CD’s. You can actually use the FTP Protocol to store your image, remotely. That’s really important, particularly in an environment where you want to have a backup that’s off-premises. If something happens in your building where you are located, then you can store this backup across the Internet at some other location. Alan: Can we back up a dynamic disk? Microsoft now gives us the ability to put multiple disks together and treat them as one disk. And I know a lot of backup software has a hard problem reading that, because it’s not a true disk.
Stephen: That’s right. And that’s something that is relatively new to Acronis. We do support that in the Echo Products. That should not be an issue. Alan: And we can back up things like RAID, because more businesses are now turning to RAID, RAID0 RAID1 and RAID5? Stephen: Certainly all of the RAID configurations we support. Because we look at the data as something separate from the hardware, we have the ability to support an exceedingly wide array of hardware configurations, network configurations. The gating factors are that we support only the Intel X86 and X64 technologies. Anything that will run on Windows Operating System or from Linux. Alan: I know with the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, you have the ability to do full image or you have the ability to do file-by-file backups. Why do I have two choices, now when I basically can back up what I want to backup in a full image? Stephen: Sometimes you might have certain files or folders that you are working on that, perhaps, you want to save those files and folders separately, just so that they are more convenient to get to if you need them again. Quite frankly, the ability to do both image and file based backup, that capability was added, because users requested it. Alan: I know I have asked you to put a lot of things in your Software and lo and behold, in the next version, there is! So, I know that you listen to users. Stephen: Well, we do our best. Users are very smart people. They know what they need. When they tell us, “We need both capabilities,” we respond. Alan: Stephen, what are we looking as far as the price of the new True Image Echo Workstation? Stephen: The price for True Image Echo Workstation has been consistent now for several years. The base price for the Product, which includes the Management Console and the ability to image across networks and across and across domains is just $79.99. The add-on for the Universal Restore is an additional $29.99.
You compare this power to our Home Product; the Home Product lists for $49.99. It’s very competitively priced for somebody that has a home network. Even though we call it Echo Workstation and it’s part of a Corporate Family, it still has the same look and feel as the Home Product. Alan: Yes, because this gives you so many more options than the Home Product that it’s worth the cost difference. Stephen: We like to think so. We do realize that there will be users that have just one computer that don’t need the networking capability; they don’t need to worry about imaging other machines on the network or storing their image remotely. For them, the Home Product is quite sufficient. Alan: Stephen, if somebody would like to find more information about the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation and of course, all the other backup Software that you have on your Website, where would they go? Stephen: You can visit us at http://www.acronis.com. Alan: Stephen, we’ve run out of time and we didn’t get a chance to talk about one of the major problem that people run into when they have to restore their computer after a major disaster, which is, “What happens if I have to restore my computer to completely different, new hardware?” I’m looking forward to picking up that conversation, next time. Stephen: Thanks so much for having me on the show. It’s always a pleasure to be here with you.
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