Acronis Backup & Recovery

Policies on machines and groups

This section helps you understand the automatic deployment and revoking policies performed by the management server when a policy or a number of policies are applied to machines and nested groups of machines in various combinations; when a policy is revoked from machines and groups; when a machine or a group is moved from one group to another.

Operations with groups to which backup policies are applied will result in changing the policies on the member machines. On any hierarchy change, that is, when moving, removing, creating groups; adding machines to static groups; or when machines enter a group based on dynamic criteria, a huge number of inheritance changes may occur. Please familiarize yourself with this section to be sure that your actions yield the desired result and to understand the result of the automated Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server operations.

  What is applying, deploying and revoking?  

Applying a policy establishes the correspondence between the policy and one or more machines. This process takes place inside the management server’s database and does not take much time.

Deploying a policy transfers the established correspondence to the machines. Physically, a bundle of tasks is created on each machine according to the configuration provided by the policy.

Revoking a policy is the reverse action to the aggregate of applying and deploying. Revoking removes the correspondence between the policy and one or more machines and then removes the tasks from the machines.

If a machine is not available or not reachable at the moment, the change will be propagated on the machine when it becomes available. This means that deploying a policy to multiple machines is not a momentary action. The same is true for revoking. These two processes may be durable and so the management server tracks and displays personal statuses for each machine that it works with, as well as the policy’s cumulative status.