StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a provider of innovative disk-based backup, disaster recovery, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops, today announced the release of StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server Edition™ 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition™ 3.0, the latest versions of the award-winning ShadowProtect™ line of disk-based backup and disaster recovery software.

ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 include hardware independent restoration (HIR), allowing IT administrators to backup, restore or migrate server, desktop and laptop systems to any environment, whether physical or virtual. 

“ShadowProtect has revolutionized the way we approach data backup and recovery,” said Dave Watts, president of NetFusion, Inc., a Los Angeles-based systems consulting firm specializing in outsourced support for small to medium-sized businesses. “ShadowProtect allows us to recover an entire server from scratch in an hour or two, and ShadowProtect 3.0 even allows us to restore to different hardware!”

HIR Features Give Disaster Recovery and System Migration Flexibility
ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 allow IT professionals to restore or migrate servers, desktops and laptops in any environment – whether virtual or physical.

In addition, ShadowProtect can migrate to new systems with tremendous flexibility – whether from a physical machine to another physical machine (P2P), a physical to a virtual machine (P2V), a virtual machine to another virtual machine (V2V) or even from a virtual machine to a physical machine (V2P). ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 support virtualization solutions, such as VMware platforms and Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC, for quick and reliable disaster recovery, system migration and consolidation.

“We’ve engineered ShadowProtect 3.0 to help IT professionals protect every Windows system in their computing environment,” said Scott Barnes, chief technology officer at StorageCraft. “This means there aren’t any limitations on the types of Windows systems you are backing up or migrating to – whether virtual or physical.”

Improved Recovery Features
The improved features in ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 also make it easier to recover servers, desktops and laptops following a catastrophic failure. New features in ShadowProtect include tools that help administrators get systems up and running in minutes.

ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 have an improved recovery environment which includes additional drivers to make it easy to recover systems and data. In addition, ShadowProtect allows IT professionals to dynamically load drivers to provide complete flexibility in adding new storage controller drivers or NIC drivers, for example.

Additional features in ShadowProtect Server Edition 3.0 and ShadowProtect Desktop Edition include:

• Bootable recovery CD based on Windows Vista; includes automatic hardware detection and network support.
• New Verify Backup Image tool to ensure backup files are recoverable.
• Additional optical media support (CD-R/RW, DVD+-R/RW, Blu-ray R/RE (both single and dual layer).
• Network throttling during backup for improved performance.
• Improved image management.
• Windows Vista support.
• Visual partitioning support.
• Remote management of recovery environment.
• Improved user interface.
• Bare metal recovery of servers, desktops and laptops in minutes.
• Ability to take online or cold state backup images without the need to install software.
• Simple view to quickly recover files and folders or update backup images.
• Network Configurator to manage domains, mapped drives and network resources.

“ShadowProtect has changed the way we protect our clients’ most valuable assets – their data,” adds NetFusion’s Watts. “Before implementing ShadowProtect, we backed up our clients’ data to tape, once a day. With ShadowProtect, we backup our clients’ servers to disk – even their Exchange servers – every 15 minutes, instead of once a day. ShadowProtect gives us the flexibility to restore from any one of those points in time.”