The Advanced Disk-based Backup Option provides the following features:

• Synthetic backup. This feature uses a policy to enable a full backup to be assembled, or synthesized, from a baseline and subsequent incremental backups that are also contained in a policy.

  The benefits of using a synthetic backup include the following:

  • A reduced backup window since the synthetic backup can be scheduled outside of the time-critical backup window.

  • Reduced network traffic since the synthetic backup does not need to access the network.

• True image restore. This feature enables Backup Exec to restore the contents of directories to what they were at the time of any full or incremental backup.

  Restore selections are made from a view of the directories as they existed at the time of the particular backup. Files that were deleted before the time of the backup are not restored. In true image restore, only the correct versions of files are restored from the appropriate full or incremental backups that contain them. Previous versions are not unnecessarily restored and then overwritten.

• Offhost backup. This feature enables the backup operation to be processed on a Backup Exec media server instead of on the remote computer, or host computer. Moving the backup from the remote computer to a media server enables better backup performance and frees the remote computer as well.