Best practices for Backup Exec 2012 Simplified Disaster Recovery

Create a custom SDR disk whenever you update the host bus adapter or network interface card hardware or software. This practice ensures that you have the latest hardware or software drivers that may be required for restore.

Use SDR to perform a test recovery of a non-production computer before a disaster occurs. You can use a virtual environment such as VMWare or Hyper-V for test recovery purposes. A test recovery lets you familiarize yourself with the SDR recovery process before it is needed.

To perform disaster recovery of a remote computer, you must purchase the Agent for Windows separately, and it must be running on the remote computer.

For disaster recovery purposes, consider the following:

• The number of installed hard disks must be the same size or larger than the original.
• The latest RAID, SCSI, or NIC (if remote) drivers are required.

SDR supports recovering computers that use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard. However, backups of UEFI-based computers cannot be restored to standard BIOS-based computers.

Note:

UEFI computers use GPT-style disks. MBR-style disk data cannot be restored to GPT-style disk, and vice versa.

For computers that support both UEFI and BIOS firmware types, you must start the computer using UEFI firmware if you backed up the computer in that mode.

If you have OEM partitions such as Dell Utility partitions on the system, they are considered part of a computer's critical system components and are backed up and restored as such.

Ensure that Backup Exec Database maintenance runs after you configure new storage devices on your Backup Exec server but before you run an SDR-compatible backup job. This ensures that the Backup Exec Database contains the latest storage device configuration details, which can be restored as part of a SDR recovery. You can set the schedule to run a Backup Exec Database maintenance by enabling the option, Enable Backup Exec database maintenance, under Backup Exec Settings > Database Maintentance.