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Over the past several years, alternative to traditional backup software products have been developed for backing up virtual machines (VMs). These image backup solutions leverage the fact that VMs encapsulate the entire application, OS and server configuration state in a single file - like a Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) for VMware. This allows the entire server backup process to be reduced to a single (large) file backup and removes the complexity involved with traditional backups, which usually had to understand file structure, application data objects, etc.

But, even with image-based backups, returning applications to operational status requires several steps. First, data must be stored from the backup storage area, where it's typically in a format proprietary to the backup software. This restore process involves converting the data into its original file format and physically copying it back to the primary storage area. This recovery transfer step can be significant with large files, and recovery transfer time can adversely impact the RTO. Another issues is restoring individual data objects specific to the application, like email messages. Most data backup products require either agents be installed on the application or a special backup process begun to support this granular restore. Message – or mailbox – level restores, as an example, often required a more complex backup process than restoring the entire email data store.

Source: SearchStorage.com

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