schedule restores to a VM

not sure if this one is possible, but we are about to start to use storagecraft shadowprotect to do online backups of servers.

sounds great, can do inc backups every 15 minutes. so if something happens bad, then you dont lose too much data.

but what is there is a hardware failure, and you need to restore to another server, the ad says it will take minutes, and yes i agree, it will take minutes to get the process starts, but if you have a 50GB server (and thats rather small ide say) then restoring that will take (50GB copied from a 100mb NAS)  about 70 minutes, thats of course after all the other stuffing around trying to get the now dead server to come alive again.

We have always used a custom written backup program, its rather simple, it does the following:

1, take a shadow copy of all drives

2, open a virtual disk and maps it as a drive letter

3, robocopy all the data from the shadow copies to the virtual disks

4, close the virtual disk and remove the shadow copy.

sure, there is a little error checking and reporting, and backup types (full, diff and inc) code in place (in fact its 90% of it), but its still remains rather simple.

But was i love most about this is that the virtual disk is bootable (once you add it to a virtual machine) so it means you can just boot it up when you want, default having it isolated from your LAN is good practise). So when i have a server die, or even do something funny, i will start to boot up the backup of it, and the same time ill try to fix the live server, 10 minutes later ill give up and go to the failover server, and that would have already booted. Sure it might be 3% slower, but your working again.

This system i also use to test boot servers every few weeks; see if that boots, install any patch's that you want to try out, reboot and it doesn't work, then there is nothing lost (besides a known good backup).

This system only did backups once every night.

so moving away from this system and going to storage craft and doing backups up to every 15 minutes. ill still like to be able to have a fail over server i can boot up with 10 minutes notice, test it out, test install patch's, or just plain fiddle with. without having a 70 minutes wait first.

So, can i, in shadow protect, do schedule restores (of course to a virtual machine)