Symantec System Recovery Full Guide and Alternative

Brief Introduction to Symantec System Recovery

Symantec System Recovery provides superior backup and disaster recovery for servers, desktops and laptops with a unified solution that enables organizations to recover from a system loss or disaster in minutes, not hours, or days. Symantec System Recovery provides fast, easy-to-use system recovery capabilities to help IT administrators meet recovery time goals. You can even perform a complete bare metal on different hardware. It also provides the ability to recover remote systems.

Symantec System Recovery captures recovery points for the entire live Windows. This backup includes the operating system, applications, system settings, files, and other items. The recovery point can be conveniently saved to various media or disk storage devices including SAN, NAS, Direct Attached Storage, RAID, and so forth. When systems fail, you can quickly restore them without the need for manual, lengthy, and error-prone processes.

Restore System with Symantec System Recovery 2013

The new Symantec System Recovery 2013 supports backup and restore of UEFI-based systems. You can refer to the following steps to see how this program performs a restore operation.

✨ Note: You must have made a backup in advance to perform disaster recovery on a UEFI-based system.

1. Open Symantec System Recovery 2013 on your computer and select the "Recover My Computer" option on the main screen.

2. SSR 2013 provides 3 options to choose from when it comes to "Select a Recovery Point to Restore". You choose one of them to find your system backup file according to your needs.

• Restore the system by date.
• Recover the system by Filename.
• Recover the system by system.

3. If the system is recovering to a RAW disk, SSR 2013 will intelligently prompt to initialize the disk to one of two methods (GPT/MBR).

4. Select the drives to recover. In case of UEFI based system Recovery it is mandatory to restore the drives on GPT initialized disk. In case UEFI system restore no additional options are required to be selected in case of any drive.

5. As per the users wish additional options can be configured for Restore Anyware feature (dissimilar Hardware restore) by pressing the ‘Ctrl’ key and selecting the option ‘Use Restore Anyware’.

• Delete existing drivers: This option deletes all the existing drivers after restoring the backup.
• Prompt for drivers: This option scans the target hardware and available drivers, SSR 2013 prompts for any unavailable hardware drivers.
• Run Windows Mini-Setup: This option runs the Windows sysprep.

6. Once you have finished configuring the recovery options, simply follow the wizard to the next screen and the recovery will begin. If you do not plan to add recovery options, you can choose to reboot when finished.

7. After rebooting, the system should successfully boot into the restored OS.

The Best Alternative to Symantec System Recovery

Symantec's interface is relatively less modern and has more caveats. Here I would like to recommend you a much easier and more convenient backup and restore software - AOMEI Backupper Server. It supports all kinds of systems. For example, Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2019, 2022 (including R2), Windows 11/10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 / Vista / XP, Windows SBS 2003, 2008, 2011.

It has 1-Click smart Windows Server backup solution and can provide continuous data protection for business. It provides you with Backup, Restore, Sync and Clone functions. You can use it to protect your data and system in all aspects. You can also use it to perform bare metal backup and recovery. If you are using this software for the first time, you can refer to the following illustrated steps to create a Windows Server backup and restore.

1. Download this software on your computer and launch it.

2. In the main interface of AOMEI Backupper, click Backup -> System Backup.

3. The system drive and its related partitions are selected by default. Now, you need to select the destination path to store the backups. External drive, NAS, network share, cloud drive, CD/DVD, and flash drive are supported.

4. Next, click Start Backup to execute this backup task.

🎈 Tips: Before starting a backup, you can customize your backup task by clicking on the three options in the lower left corner.

▶ Options: You can add comments to your backups to distinguish them from other backup tasks. You can also configure task specific settings, including the compression level, backup encryption, notifications, splitting image, intelligent sector, VSS, and more.

▶ Schedule: You can click Schedule Backup to set a backup mode, you can choose daily, weekly, monthly, event-triggers, and USB plug in.

▶ Scheme: You are provided with two backup methods – Incremental and Differential Backup. It also offers you 3 cleanup methods, including By quality, By time, By daily/weekly/monthly.

5. Once your backup is done, if you want to do a system recivery in the future, just click Restore > Select Task/Select Image File in the main screen of AOMEI Backupper.

Summary

In this article, you can learn how to use Symantec System Recovery to perform a system restore. The article also mentions a more convenient and simpler alternative tool to help you perform system backups and restores.

When you want to upgrade the hard drive on your Windows server, you can use AOMEI Backupper to migrate your system and data, which will save you a lot of time and effort. Also, with its help, you will never encounter problems like Windows Server 2016 system state backup failure.