I have used Acronis in the Windows environment and can give some insight into its operation.
Firstly I would like to say that I think it is a very good disaster recover solution for a single server/workstation. It is not designed for backing up to tape and is not ideal for backing up to DVD. It is really meant for backing up to hard drive or a network share. Backing up to a USB hard drives works well. When backing up file systems it understands like NTFS or the more popular Linux file systems it does not have to back up unused sectors. This effectively gives it a "file by file" type backup capability and allows differential/incremental backups. For supported file systems you can also perform backups of selected files and directories instead of imaging the whole drive. Data compression is supported so images can be considerably smaller than the source. For "unsupported" file systems the only options are raw imaging of drives or partitions. There are three basic ways to do Acronis backups: 1. Boot the Linux "live cd" environment and backup your system from there. The advantage is that you know all the file systems are off-line and won't have open/changed file issues. This environment can also be used to perform disaster recovery restores. 2. If you installed the feature you can boot from a recovery boot sector/partition on the system being backed up. This gives similar functionality to booting the live cd. 3. You can run your backups from your live system when Acronis is installed on the system as an application. This is the most useful strategy when using Acronis as your every day backup program and not just a disaster recovery solution. Acronis installs low level drivers that allow it to backup open files under Windows. Windows shadow copy functionality is also used where appropriate. In this mode you can schedule backups to take place automatically. System state such as the registry can be included in the backup. A popular feature of Acronis is its ability to create a hidden backup partition on the machine. With this you perform a full backup and then schedule regular incremental backups. This allows very quick recovery of accidentally deleted files or fast disaster recovery as long as the hidden partition is not damaged. By setting the backup to create DVD sized chunks you can write this backup to DVD media to be taken off site for true disaster protection. You can restore directly from the DVD's in a disaster. One of the features of Acronis is that you can mount a backup as a virtual drive and copy files from the backup using standard copy commands. This makes restoring selected files very easy. Kern Sibbald wrote: > I agree. It could be nice for making disaster recovery backups, but I'm not > sure that disk imaging can restore a single file. Even if it could, I cannot > imagine how they could do it *after* the system has continued to run and the > disk image is different. > > For supported file systems Acronis creates a "functional equivalent" image instead of a sector by sector image. As it understands the file system layout it can restore individual files. > In addition, unless I am mistaken, to make a consistent disk image, you > essentially have stop the system from modifying the disk while you make the > image. How many of you want to unmount raw partitions while your system is > running? Not me, even if my machines are ususally idle when the backup is > done. > > Low level drivers allow it to backup running systems using snapshot technology. > Also, what if you want to restore a file to a different system or OS, or you > want to restore to a different disk with a different size (perhaps smaller > than the original???). I would have a lot of concerns about a disk imaging > system other than taking a disaster recovery snapshot By mounting the backup image as a virtual disk you can extract individual files using the OS supported copy commands. The problem is you must have dumped the whole backup image onto your hard drive (or have it on a external drive or network share) before you can mount it as a virtual drive. Acronis has built in partition resizing and creating tools. You can restore to larger or smaller partitions than the original partition size as long as the data will fit in the new partition. Of course this only works for supported file systems. Raw images need to be restored to a partition the same size. Regards Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
