Acronis Backup & Recovery

Basic concepts

Please familiarize yourself with the basic notions used in the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 graphical user interface and documentation. Advanced users are welcome to use this section as a step-by-step quick start guide. The details can be found in the context help.

  Backup under operating system  

1. To protect data on a machine, install Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 agent on the machine which becomes a managed machine from this point on.
2. To be able to manage the machine using Graphical User Interface, install Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Console on the same machine or any machine from which you prefer to operate. If you have the standalone product edition, skip this step since in your case the console installs with the agent.
3. Run the console. To be able to recover the machine’s operating system if the system fails to start, create bootable media.
4. Connect the console to the managed machine.
5. Create a backup plan.

   To do so, you have to specify, at the very least, the data to be protected and the location where the backup archive will be stored. This will create a minimal backup plan consisting of one task that will create a full backup of your data every time the task is manually started. A complex backup plan might consist of multiple tasks which run on schedule; create full, incremental or differential backups; perform archive maintenance operations such as backup validation or deleting outdated backups (archive cleanup). You can customize backup operations using various backup options, such as pre/post backup commands, network bandwidth throttling, error handling or notification options.

6. Use the Backup plans and tasks page to view information about your backup plans and tasks and monitor their execution. Use the Log page to browse the operations log.
7. The location where you store backup archives is called a vault. Navigate to the Vaults page to view information about your vaults. Navigate further to the specific vault to view archives and backups and perform manual operations with them (mounting, validating, deleting, viewing contents). You can also select a backup to recover data from it.

The following diagram illustrates the notions discussed above. For more definitions please refer to the Glossary.

  Backup using bootable media  

You can boot the machine using the bootable media, configure the backup operation in the same way as a simple backup plan and execute the operation. This will help you extract files and logical volumes from a system that failed to boot, take an image of the offline system or back up sector-by-sector an unsupported file system.

  Recovery under operating system  

When it comes to data recovery, you create a recovery task on the managed machine. You specify the vault, then select the archive and then select the backup referring to the date and time of the backup creation, or more precisely, to the time when the creation has started. In most cases, the data will be reverted to that moment.

Examples of exceptions to this rule:
Recovering a database from a backup that contains the transaction log (a single backup provides multiple recovery points and so you can make additional selections).
Recovering multiple files from a file backup taken without snapshot (each file will be reverted to the moment when it was actually copied to the backup).

You also specify the destination where to recover the data. You can customize the recovery operation using recovery options, such as pre/post recovery commands, error handling or notification options.

The following diagram illustrates data recovery under the operating system (online). No backup can proceed on the machine while the recovery operation is taking place. If required, you can connect the console to another machine and configure a recovery operation on that machine. This ability (remote parallel recovery) first appeared in Acronis Backup & Recovery 10; the previous Acronis products do not provide it.

  Recovery using bootable media  

Recovery over a volume locked by the operating system, such as the volume where the operating system resides, requires a reboot to the bootable environment which is a part of the agent. After the recovery is completed, the recovered operating system goes online automatically.

If the machine fails to boot or you need to recover data to bare metal, you boot the machine using the bootable media and configure the recovery operation in the same way as the recovery task. The following diagram illustrates the recovery using the bootable media.