Data protected
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The following apply to image-level protection:
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Assets are protected and the disk and volume level. |
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Backups include the 'in use' regions of the Windows disk or volume only. Deleted regions are not included. |
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Provide application consistent backup and recovery for NTFS and ReFS filesystems. |
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Provide crash consistent backup and recovery for FAT, FAT32, and exFAT filesystems. |
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The following apply to file-level protection:
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Assets are protected at the file system and operating system level. (Backups must include system state to protect the OS and for disaster recovery of the entire asset.) |
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Provide application and operating system consistent backup and recovery. |
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Protect configurations that cannot be protected by image-level backups, such as cluster shared volumes (CSVs) and VHDS clusters. |
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Protect Azure and AWS virtual machines. (Image-level backups are not supported for these VMs.) |
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Backup options
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Image-level backups support these options:
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Opt to include or exclude volumes from backup. |
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Opt to run commands on the asset before or after the backup job. |
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Opt to index the backup so you can search an asset's backups by filename to recover individual files. This feature is available in release 10.4.8 and higher. This option is set by asset (see To edit an agent-based asset for details). |
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File-level backups support these options:
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Opt to include or exclude files, folders, or volumes from backup. |
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Opt to exclude system state. |
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Opt to run commands on the asset before or after the backup job. |
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Recommended where more granular exclusion of data is required. |
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Backup and recovery job performance
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Image-level jobs yield faster backup and recovery:
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Backup and recovery jobs use multiple parallel streams for fast performance. (Resource availability on the Windows asset impacts the number of streams used.) |
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Backup performance is not impacted by the size or number of individual protected files. |
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File-level jobs yield slower backup and recovery:
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Backup and recovery jobs use a single stream. |
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Backup performance is impacted by the size or number of individual protected files. |
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Switch to image-level backups to avoid creating aliases for large assets or assets with many small files. |
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Backup size
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Image-level full backups may be larger than file-level fulls of the same asset.
Smaller deduplication ratio than with file-level backups. (Fewer duplicate blocks found, more unique blocks stored.) This may result in decreased on-appliance retention.
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File-level full backups may be smaller than image-level fulls of the same asset.
Greater deduplication ratio than with image-level backups. (More duplicate blocks found, fewer unique blocks stored.) This may result in greater on-appliance retention.
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Recovery
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These recovery procedures are supported for image-level backups:
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Recover individual files by browsing the contents of a backup. |
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Opt to enable Index Image-Level Backups on the Edit Asset page so you can search the asset's backups by filename to recover individual files. This feature is available in release 10.4.8 and higher. For details, see To edit an agent-based asset. |
Notes:
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The index feature is not supported for recovery of ReFS filesystems. Recover by browsing the backup instead. |
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Filename search of indexed Windows image-level backups is not supported for recovery from imported backup copies. Recover by browsing the imported copy instead. |
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Assets with high-frequency backups or with very large file counts can add considerable load to the appliance. Consider appliance load when enabling the index option for these types of assets. |
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To index the backup, the job creates and mounts an object. If a file recovery object is already mounted for the asset, the backup runs but no index is created (as only one object per asset can be mounted at any given time). The resulting backup completes in warning status, with a message indicating that no index was created. |
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Use Windows image-level replicas to quickly spin up a virtual replica of a failed Windows asset on your VMware or Hyper-V host. |
Notes:
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Only one Windows replica can exist per Windows asset. You cannot run both an image-level replica and a file-level replica of the same asset at the same time. If a replica exists, you must tear it down before creating another for the asset. |
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You can opt to run image-level replicas in the Unitrends Cloud. Contact your Account Manager for assistance. |
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Use instant recovery for rapid disaster recovery of a failed asset. |
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Use bare metal recovery to recover a failed asset to identical physical hardware or to a virtual machine. |
For details, see Recovering Windows Image-level Backups.
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These recovery procedures are supported for file-level backups:
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Recover an entire backup. This restores the asset to the point-in-time at which the backup was taken. |
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Recover individual files by searching by filename or browsing the contents of a backup. |
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Use Windows file-level replicas to quickly spin up a virtual replica of a failed Windows asset. |
Notes:
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Only one Windows replica can exist per Windows asset. You cannot run both an image-level replica and a file-level replica of the same asset at the same time. If a replica exists, you must tear it down before creating another for the asset. |
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You can opt to run file-level replicas in the Unitrends Cloud. Contact your Account Manager for assistance. |
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Use bare metal recovery to recover a failed asset to identical physical hardware, to dissimilar physical hardware, or to a virtual machine. |
For details, see Recovering File-level Backups.
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Hosted applications
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Exchange and SQL applications are included in image-level backups. Image-level backups can be taken with VSS copy-only snapshots (which do NOT truncate application logs) or with VSS full snapshots (which do truncate application logs by default). Image-level backups provide application protection but fewer recovery options than Unitrends application backups.
Note: Oracle on Windows – You must use Windows file-level backups to protect the Oracle server and Oracle application backups to protect hosted applications. Windows image-level backups cannot be used for Oracle.
Use one of these strategies to protect an Exchange or SQL server with image-level backups:
Note: Additional recovery considerations apply for SQL clustered instances, SQL availability groups, and Exchange DAG nodes. For details, see Considerations for recovering SQL clusters, SQL availability groups, and Exchange DAGs.
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Run image-level backups using VSS copy-only snapshots, along with Unitrends application backups. Note the following: |
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This strategy provides additional options for application recovery. For example, you can recover a database, transaction log, storage group, or Exchange item from an application backup. (See Application backups below for details.) |
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Image-level backups use VSS copy-only snapshots by default. You do not need to configure any special setting to use copy-only snapshots. |
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Image-level backups that are run with VSS copy-only snapshots do not affect any application backup chain and do not truncate any application log files. |
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Logs are automatically truncated by these Unitrends application backups: Exchange fulls, Exchange incrementals, and SQL transaction log backups. |
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Run image-level backups using VSS full snapshots to protect both the system files and hosted applications. Note the following: |
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Each image-level backup truncates any Exchange and SQL transaction logs for any online user databases on the server. |
Note: Image-level backups run using VSS full snapshots do NOT truncate logs for the following: offline databases, databases whose parent application instance is offline, and SQL system databases (master, model, and tempdb).
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From an image-level backup, you can recover individual files, use replicas or instant recovery to quickly recover a failed or corrupted Windows machine, or use bare metal recovery to recover a failed asset to identical physical hardware or to a virtual machine. |
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VSS full snapshots are not used for image-level backups by default. You must configure this setting by checking these boxes in the Edit Asset dialog: Show Image Level Backup Settings and Allow application aware. For details, see To edit an agent-based asset. |
Notes:
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For hosted Exchange and SQL applications, you cannot run both application backups and image-level backups that are configured with the Allow application aware setting. This would result in backup failures (because VSS full snapshots truncate all application logs). |
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There is no way to recover SQL databases or Exchange instances separately. You can recover Exchange and SQL files from image backups, but you cannot easily recover a database or Exchange instance after data loss or corruption. |
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Once an asset is configured with the Allow application aware setting: |
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Any existing SQL and Exchange schedules are disabled. |
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Windows file-level replicas of the asset cannot include SQL or Exchange applications. An error displays if you attempt to configure an application when adding or editing the replica. |
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Any existing file-level replicas that include SQL or Exchange should be manually deleted as their application data will become stale over time (since there will be no future application backups being restored to them). You can then recreate the replica without SQL and Exchange. |
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Run image-level backups using VSS copy-only snapshots. Note the following: |
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Application logs are NOT truncated. The database administrator must manually truncate the application logs. |
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From an image-level backup, you can recover individual files or use instant recovery to quickly recover a failed or corrupted Windows machine, or use bare metal recovery to recover a failed asset to identical physical hardware or to a virtual machine. |
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There is no way to recover SQL databases or Exchange instances separately. You can recover Exchange and SQL files from image backups, but you cannot easily recover a database or Exchange instance after data loss or corruption. |
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Active Exchange databases and active SQL user databases are automatically excluded from file-level backups. (SQL system databases are always included to support Windows replicas.)
File-level backups are taken with VSS full snapshots. Full file-level backups do NOT truncate application logs.
Run file-level backups along with Unitrends application backups to protect hosted applications. (See Application backups below for details.)
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Application backups
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Unitrends application backups provide these benefits:
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SQL, Exchange, Oracle, and SharePoint backups perform application-level post backup processing, such as log truncation. |
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Support all SQL database recovery models. Must run asset-level application backups for all recovery models other than simple. |
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Support backup of multi-node SharePoint farms. |
For more on application protection, see Application Backups Overview.
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SLA policies
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SLA policies supported for image-level backups.
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SLA policies are supported for file-level backups.
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Copy Data Management
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Image-level backups and image-level replicas that reside on a VMware or Hyper-V host can be used with the Copy Data Management feature.
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File-level backups can be used to create Windows replicas. Windows replicas that reside on a VMware or Hyper-V host can be used with the Copy Data Management feature.
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