Many customers are confronting the confusing number of options and configurations when it comes to backing up and restoring their network attached storage (NAS) servers. Most NAS vendors and data protection providers (such as Symantec) have multiple options for protecting your NAS environment. This paper will help you make sense of the numerous options available to you for NAS backup and restore. You may be asking yourself questions such as:

• What is the best way to protect my particular NAS environment?
• What is NDMP and how does it help protect my NAS environment?
• What are the options for improving NDMP backup speeds?
• I currently back up my NAS over CIFS or NFS. Is this safe?
• What is needed to recover individual files and directories at a granular level with my NAS backups?
• What about backups to tape, VTL or disk?
• Can NetBackup™ client and NAS backups share the same devices?

This paper addresses these questions by describing the best practices for protecting and recovering NAS devices utilizing the NDMP (Network Data Management Protocol) from vendors such as NetApp, EMC, and IBM as well as discussing the challenges associated with protecting NAS appliances and multiple strategies that can be used to address them.