Backup Exec System Recovery 2011

I’m not one to ever be totally in love with anything. So I’m going to lay it out like this.

Backup Exec System Recovery 2011 is you best friend for hard to configure or critical computers. It is not your normal backup software. Once its install you get the normal options. It wants to you to create a backup job. For some odd reason if you have a second hard drive it assumes that its only for backups and no one ever installs a second drive to gasp put more data on. If you are smart don't use the wizard. Create a manual job. selecting the drives is normal just click one and then hold crtl or shift and select the rest.
when you create the job it asks you when to run the backup and when to create a "Recover Point".  A Recover Point is not a full backup. It is a Full IMAGE of the hard drives you selected. The normal backups are incremental IMAGES. The program defaults to creating a recover point once per month, and keeping THREE. It will not remove the oldest until it completes the new one. So you need enough disk space for once more then the number you select. With a 160GB drive set to daily backups with the default recover point settings. I had used 800GB for backups for just one computer.
Yes the software supports file level restores and that’s why they have these space hogging options, but that’s not why I would suggest using it.

Recommended Config
Backup every day you use the computer. So say Monday through Friday. Set it to create a new recover point weekly. Retain 1 or 2 Recover Points. and have it create the recover Point on Saturday.  Have it backup to a network share don’t mess with FTP. You also may consider turning on the email function so you know what its doing with out checking the computer.

What that gets you.

When the hard drive dies in that wonderful computer you spend 3 months getting the 50gb of software working on because it will. All you need to do is install a new drive, pop in the recover cd and point it to the folder you keep the recover points, then choose the date you want to recover from. Once the restore is done you have the computer back the way it was when you last left it.
Total time for me on mine was 2 hours over a 1 GB link (500GB of data and software).

Issues:

Backup jobs starting are classified as High Priority Info Success events
Backup jobs failing due to system shutdown are classified as High Priority Info Success events.
Moral:
Just because it says success in the subject could mean that it successfully failed. You need to read the whole email to know for sure. It also sends a lot of email.
All in all the program is worth the money if you need to reduce downtime and have a quick recover time.