Usage Scenarios; How To Use - ACRONIS Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server SBS Edition User Manual

Because serving requests is performed simultaneously with recovery, the system operation can slow
down even if recovery priority in the recovery options is set to Low. This way, the system downtime
is reduced to a minimum at the cost of a temporary performance downgrade.

Usage scenarios

1. The system uptime is one of the efficiency criteria.
Examples: Client-oriented online services, Web-retailers, polling stations.
2. The system/storage space ratio is heavily biased toward storage.
Some machines are being used as storage facilities, where the operating system claims a small
space segment and all other disk space is committed to storage, such as movies, sounds or other
multimedia files. Some of these storage volumes can be extremely large as compared to the
system and so practically all the recovery time will be dedicated to recovering the files, which
might be used much later on, if in any near future at all.
If you opt for Acronis Active Restore, the system will be operational in a short time. Users will be
able to open the necessary files from the storage and use them while the rest of the files, which
are not immediately necessary, are being recovered in the background.
Examples: movie collection storage, music collection storage, multimedia storage.

How to use

1. Back up the system disk or volume to a location accessible through the system's BIOS. This may
be Acronis Secure Zone, a USB hard drive, a flash drive or any internal hard drive.
If your operating system and its loader reside on different volumes, always include both volumes in the
backup. The volumes must also be recovered together; otherwise there is a high risk that the operating
system will not start.
2. Create bootable media.
3. If a system failure occurs, boot the machine using the bootable media. Start the console and
connect to the bootable agent.
4. Configure the system recovery: select the system disk or volume and select the Use Acronis
Active Restore check box.
Acronis Active Restore will choose for the boot-up and subsequent recovery the first operating system
found during the backup scan. Do not try to recover more than one operating system using Active Restore if
you want the result to be predictable. When recovering a multi-boot system, choose only one system
volume and boot volume at a time.
5. Once the system recovery is started, the operating system boots from the backup. The Acronis
Active Restore icon appears in the system tray. The machine becomes operational and ready to
provide necessary services. The immediate user sees the drive tree and icons and can open files
or launch applications even though they were not yet recovered.
The Acronis Active Restore drivers intercept system queries and set the immediate priority for
recovery of the files that are necessary to serve the incoming requests. While this on-the-fly
recovery proceeds, the continuing recovery process is transferred to the background.
If you try to log off, shut down or hibernate the machine using the Start Menu commands, the end of the
current session will be automatically postponed until the recovery is completed. Should you decide to switch
off the machine with the Power button though, all the changes made to the system since the last boot up
would be lost, the system will not be recovered, not even partially, and the only possible solution in this
case will be to start the recovery process anew, from a bootable media.
6. The background recovery continues until all the selected volumes are recovered, the log entry is
made and the Acronis Active Restore icon disappears from the system tray.
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