PowerQuest V2i Protector 2.0 Small Business Edition
NAS, or a RAID array without taking the server offline. In effect, the technology would be familiar to anyone that has had experience with Symantec's Ghost or similar imaging software.
So if your entire server goes belly up, you simply wheel in a new server and perform a "bare metal" restore in a matter of minutes without needing to fiddle with drivers, patches, and updates (a bare metal restore bypasses reinstalling the OS, creates a disk partition automatically, and recovers the entire system without manual intervention).
In addition to the bare metal restore, Protector is capable of restoring just the OS, data, or individual files or folders. A neat feature is that backup image files can be mounted as read-only drives for shared access by others.
No doubt you can see a limitation in this approach: for a bare metal restore, the new server must be pretty much identical to the old; you can't replace your old no-name server with a new HP box, for example. Another limitation with Protector is that it only supports Windows 200x, Windows NT, and Windows Small Business Servers.
The user interface is very clean and simple, which is perhaps not surprising given the overall simplicity of the features set. The interface is so easy to navigate that it is possible in just a few minutes to create a backup task and backup your server without a single glance at the online help.
Creating a backup job is just a few straightforward steps; there are not a lot of options other than full or incremental backup and your basic scheduling. Restoring your drive is just as straightforward although if the system drive goes belly up, a bootable rescue disk can be created to retrieve the image. It is also easy to find and restore a single file or folder from the backup image file.
| Product | PowerQuest V2i Protector 2.0 Small Business Edition |
| Price | $2080 (single license) |
| Vendor | PowerQuest |
| Phone | 02 9521 6466 |
| Web | www.powerquest.com |
| Interoperability |  |
| Windows OS support only. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| Reasonably basic feature set works very well but does not cater for infrastructure growth as well as some other solutions. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Average value for money given its limited feature set and target of the small business market. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| Phone support during normal business hours and 24x7 Web access. Further year support is renewable at 21 percent of the license cost. | |
| Rating |  ½ |
You should really b looking at the Proware range from Datastor Australia if you want to really lower your total cost of investment.
www.datastor.com.au