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I am setting up a new Unitrends UEB solution for a few servers and a mess of workstations. All in all I like that it works. Which seems to be hard to find in a backup solution.

But I do have some questions / frustrations. Maybe you can provide some insight?

  1. On the wire compression. - I have some systems on our LAN utilizing ISP Layer 3 VPN access back to our primary site. These are not high speed connections, but on our LAN in every sense. I would like very much to reduce the “over the wire” data transfer. Support states 100mbps minimum. Non supported otherwise. Is compression on the data source possible?

  2. Agent Push - I spent 4 hours fighting this, then just did it in PDQ in 15 min. I Cannot get any credentials to work. Followed the PDF to no solution. Is this environmental or does everyone have these issues? Will non “establish trust” agents be able to be push updated?

  3. BMR vs IBMR - What is the difference between BRM and IBRM, other than linux vs WinPE. Which is appropriate in what case? I cannot get BRM to detect hardware, where IBRM I can load drivers at least.

  4. Is there a way to see your dedupliation ratio?

  5. Is there a way to see how many recovery points you have for each system? An overview preferably. Without looking at “Restore” for each.

  6. Reporting - Is there a way to specify reporting criteria. For example I don’t care if a workstation does not backup until it has missed 5 days. But for servers I care immediately. (I have everything sorted in Navigation Groups)

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  1. Reports - Data Reduction

  2. Reports - Backups

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William - Thanks for choosing Unitrends! I’m sorry that these items have you frustrated.I’m going to try to answer your questions below, but since you have so many questions, you may find it easier to contact support. Have you met with the install team yet?:

  1. Have you tried seeding your initial full backup to the appliance and then doing incrementals going forward?
  2. Are there specific agents that you’re having issues with, or all of them?
  3. I’m not sure that I know what BRM is. Can you specify?
  4. You should be able to see this via the data reduction report. More information is available here.
  5. Have you watched our video about file level restores? It goes over recovery points.
  6. It sounds like you’re asking how to configure alerts. This KB article covers that.

Please let me know what other questions you may have.

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  1. are you backing up over the VPN? If so, that is not supported and there is no compression until it gets to the Unitrends. You should be backing it up to a local Unitrends install and then replicating over the VPN which will give you compression and also the ability to throttle the bandwidth used.
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  1. Backups not supported over the VPN. I put a small 201 at the remote site and am using replication.

  2. Never had any issues with the agent push and never needed credentials.

  3. BMR doesn’t work on software RAID if your backups are coming off if a device that uses it. Aside from that I was told today that with using full backups I can spin up an instant recovery instance of the client computer using a full backup, no need to use BMR as it just takes up storage. You could do it either way, but you don’t need to maintain both.

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  1. I have not. I am aware you can seed for “Replication” but not backup jobs.
  2. All agents. Win 7/XP/2k3/2k8
  3. BMR = “Cold Bare Metal Media” ISO created from BMR agent install, I believe it uses the data source of “Bare Metal” when creating backup.
    IBMR = WinPE ISO located at \xx\cirtual_failover. I believe this uses the regular file level backup for its data source.
  4. Answered. Thank You.
  5. Yes I am aware of how that functions. Because Unitrends is designed to use all of the disk space. I would like to know the count of restore points that are being maintained for each system. Is there a way other than looking at the calendar for each server?
  6. Yes I have alerts configured. But would like to have different thresholds for different navigation groups.
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William - Here are some updates:

  1. As others have questioned, are you trying to backup over VPN?
  2. So all of your clients are Win 7/XP/2k3/2k8?
  3. Thanks for clarifying - in your post originally it stated BRM, and I thought it might be a typo, but didn’t want to assume anything. Our BareMetal backups do create an ISO. It’s important to remember to create a boot CD for all clients that you plan to use BareMetal Recovery on, but remember that you only need one boot CD for each client type, so if all of your clients are Win 7/XP/2k3/2k8, then you only need one boot CD since the BareMetal Recovery only restores to the C partition.
  4. Great!
  5. Looking into this for you, but I believe the answer is no.
  6. Then you need to update the settings for each group to reflect the settings that you want.
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A few days have passed and I have received resolution for many of the items. But a few questions will exist.

  1. I am running an unsupported configuration. Oh well, I’ll see if it works. As a side though. I currently have a Replication Target license as well. Will UEB Spice Works Edition replicate to this target?
  2. I spoke with a support engineer on this topic. I gave up and decided to continue using PDQ Deploy. Done.
  3. The document located Scott Mickey Blog – Your SUPER-powered WP Engine Blog does a very nice job explaining when each BMR solution is appropriate. Done.
  4. Done.
  5. The best way I can find to accomplish this would to choose at the highest tier in navigation. Then choose <Backup: Last 7 Days.> Then to cycle <Collapse / Expand> to get a tiered version.
  6. I gave up on this, and just set my workstations schedules not to report failures.
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William - I’m glad that many of your issues have been resolved. If you’d like to get the rest of them resolved, I’m sure that the engineer assigned to your installation would be happy to follow up with you. Do you want me to have them give you a call?