903 - Converting Accounts from SE/DL to ESE – Redstor

We strongly recommend converting your SE/DL Accounts to our Enterprise Server Edition (ESE), which will enable you to take advantage of a much greater range of functionality, as well as improved security.

A few of the key benefits of using ESE over SE/DL include:

Access to Full System Backup and Recovery. (By comparison, SE's Windows Image Backup is very slow and consumes a lot of local space.)
Access to InstantData.
Support for millions of files and large data volume backup.
Much faster backups.
Remote tunnel capabilities that do not require firewall changes.

Conversion of an Account typically takes less than five minutes.

Before you begin, please read the information below. You can then follow the steps in Article 904 to convert your Accounts.

How does conversion work?

1. The Account's data is converted from SE/DL to ESE format

Several checks are done to ensure that the SE/DL Account can be converted.
The Account is prepared by checking the data integrity.
Backup indexes and files are converted to the new ESE format while the SE/DL data is still preserved.
At this point, the Account being converted is disabled and locked to temporarily prevent any other tasks, such as backups and restores. The duration of this lock depends on the number and size of files in the account, the type of data, and the level of patching (how much files changed between backups), which can vary widely, e.g.:
- less than 10GB of data - 5 minutes
- 250GB of data - 2 hours
- several terabytes of data - 24+ hours
Depending on the backup schedule, it is therefore possible that one or more backups may be missed.
Once the conversion is complete, the data is verified with another quick IntegrityCheck.
The Account's original SE/DL data is now deleted and the ESE Agent connects to the converted Account.

2. The Agent is automatically upgraded to ESE

Once the Account has been converted, the SE/DL Agent is automatically upgraded to ESE at the next auto update check. There is no need to uninstall SE and install ESE.

3. All applicable SE/DL settings are converted to an ESE equivalent

This ensures that your operations can continue seamlessly.

What can be converted?

Note: Only features and settings that are enabled in SE/DL will be converted.

1. Operating systems:

Windows 7: 32- & 64-bit
Windows 8.1: 32- & 64-bit
Windows 10: 32- & 64-bit
Windows Server 2008 R2: 64-bit only
Windows Server 2012 (incl. R2): 64-bit only
Windows Server 2016 Standard

2. Applications:

Exchange (through VSS): 2010, 2013, 2016
Hyper-V: Windows Server 2012
MS SQL (through VSS): only 2012 (incl. R2), 2014 (Express), 2016 (Express)
Script Plugin
SIMS, FMS, Discover
SQL Dumping plugin (can be replaced by VSS or Script Plugin)
Windows Image Backup
System State

Note: SE System State backup maps to ESE Windows Image Backup System State only backup, which leverages the Microsoft feature and takes a long time. We recommend using the remote tunnel to turn off Windows Image Backup and turn on System State or Full System Backup instead.

3. Settings:

Bandwidth throttling
Command Line Support (can be achieved with PowerShell and REST calls)
Email notification
Password prompt (ESE v17.5 and later)
Proxy settings
SE Remote Management (will be converted to Remote Access in ESE)
SE Staged Backup (will be converted to Transfer Deduplication in ESE)

What cannot be converted?