Businesses are increasingly reliant on data in both physical and virtual environments.  Even when backup is consistent, recovery of data is often slow and cumbersome. Many times, choices involve only a complete restoration of an entire system, a laborious process, when specific data is urgently needed for business continuity.  A granular restore can be a business-saving solution. This process has a number of advantages in a number of circumstances.

• Single Backup. This method of recovery allows organizations to perform both file-based and image-based restoration from a single backup operation. This reduces recovery time dramatically, and it also conserves storage resources.  While other backup solutions require multiple operations for recovery of an entire virtual or physical system and recovery of individual folders or files, a granular restore allows an immediate recovery of specific files from a single, general backup.
• Virtual Compatibility. In a virtual environment, the process provides administrators with options for total system recovery and file recovery with a single backup operation. In the event of a virtual server failure, administrators can retrieve urgently needed files directly from the single backup and restore them to another virtual or physical machine.
• Communications Data Retrieval.  A granular restore is especially useful for firms heavily reliant of communications software and data storage.  When data is lost, recovery of specific files or emails is easily accomplished.  With this tool, IT administrators can quickly provide recent email activity to the user while addressing larger system issues.
• Disaster Recovery.  A granular restore greatly reduces the pain of disaster recovery. Because specific files can be made available almost instantly, administrators can minimize interruption of business continuity.  In addition, backup files with this technology are portable.  They can be stored locally, virtually, online, or in removable media.  This allows IT administrators to tend to disaster recovery remotely or at the site.

The significance of email in business operations and the critical importance of business data demand that organizations have a means in place to prevent data loss.  However, the security of the data is only one part of an effective solution. Speed of recovery can often make the difference between a very costly disaster and an inconvenience.  Today's IT departments often put a great deal of thought into storage of data, and even its recovery.  Nearly everyone recognizes the need for a secure and reliable backup.  However, many man-hours of IT work and idle staff hours translate into monetary losses that are, for the most part, avoidable.  For increased business continuity and rapid recovery of critical data, a granular restore solution should be considered carefully.