Thousands of companies worldwide are already using N2WS Backup & Recovery to protect their workloads on AWS with powerful backup and disaster recovery. We hear a lot that it’s one of those solutions that is ridiculously easy to use. All backups and policies are seen under one console, the recovery is extremely straightforward (not to mention immediate), and, alerts and reporting let everyone breathe easy, and sleep at night knowing downtime is not an issue. But did you know that you can also leverage N2WS to help you manage your AWS environment? Here are five nifty features that might just come in handy and help you realize the benefits of being a cloud-first organization.
1. Clone your environment
You can clone instances to create a staging environment to carry out testing. Instead of having a continuous running test environment, you could just take a first backup session of your newly configured server and freeze this backup session using the Freezer option before putting those servers online. These frozen backup sessions will appear in the N2WS Freezer section and you will be able to spin up your servers with no data but in line with production, whenever you need to do testing.
2. Migrate production environments to other regions or accounts
There may come a time when you need to move your production environment from one region to another or move your test instances to another AWS account. You can easily do this by changing your instances DR option in the backup policy to perform a DR to the new target region. You can also easily authenticate a new production AWS account in the N2WS account section and set it as a DR account. Then you just need to change your Cross Account DR option (in the backup policy DR section) to this new account. Once you have new DR backup sessions in the new region or new account you can restore your instances there. Simple!
3. Want to quickly restore a file to a Windows instance? No problem!
Sometimes you have instances that you use as files servers for your end users and they regularly come to you because they have deleted a shared file by mistake or they want to revert to a previous version. N2WS offers you the possibility to do File-Level Recovery and download a file from a snapshot that corresponds to a particular backup session – you can then send this file to your end user. However very often you will need to upload this file to the actual instance, which is not that easy. Because N2WS is a web portal, you can easily connect to the appropriate windows instance’s desktop, access N2WS via the local internet browser and download the file. What about Linux? Use the same workaround as above and install a desktop for your Linux machine.
4. Create a backup … of your backup
What if the region where your N2WS instance is running goes down? Or your primary AWS account is compromised? Don’t panic – N2WS knows how to backup itself! Simply add the “cpmdata” backup policy. This is a predefined policy, already configured with N2WS. Once you create a policy name cpmdata, N2WS will back up itself. In the unlikely event that something goes wrong in your environment you can go back to the AWS marketplace and launch another instance of N2WS, but this time it will be your DR region or account. Connect to the N2WS portal and during the installation steps, you will have the possibility to import data from the previous instance. In a couple of minutes, you will be back in action! See the step-by-step here.
5. Banish annoying maintenance windows
Today’s fast-paced businesses cannot afford downtime. With N2WS you can achieve application-consistency and eliminate the need for maintenance windows. It doesn’t matter if your instance is online or offline – N2WS will back it up. Enable this by using our thin backup agent. The agent makes the link between N2WS and the Windows VSS Service running on your instance to set the DB in the backup state just before the backup session.
Want to try all this for yourself? Start a 30-day no-obligation trial of N2WS Backup & Recovery. Be sure to check out all of our new and enhanced features from our latest 2.7 release . We are very excited to have rolled out support for Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, enhanced reporting, and much more.
