Selecting data to back up

To select the data to back up

1. In the Data to back up section, select the type of data you want to be backed up. The list of available data types depends on the agents running on the machine and the types of licenses:

   Disks/volumes

   Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for Windows or Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for Linux is installed.

   Select this option to back up entire physical machine or its individual disks or volumes. To be able to back up this data, you must have Administrator or Backup operator privileges.

   A disk-level backup enables you to recover the entire system in case of severe data damage or hardware failure. The backup procedure is faster than copying files, and may significantly speed up the backup process when backing up large volumes of data.

   Folders/files

   Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for Windows or Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 for Linux is installed.

   Select this option to back up specific files and folders.

   A file-level backup is not sufficient for recovery of the operating system. Choose file backup if you plan to keep safe only certain data (the current project, for example). This will reduce the archive size, thus saving storage space.

   In order to recover your operating system along with all the settings and applications, you have to perform a disk backup.

   Virtual machines

   Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for ESX(i) or Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Hyper-V is installed.

   Select this option to back up entire virtual machines residing on a virtualization server or their disks or volumes.

   Backing up an entire virtual machine, its disks, or volumes yields a standard disk backup. In addition, this backup stores the virtual machine configuration. This configuration will be suggested by default when recovering the backup content to a new virtual machine. For more information about backing up virtual machines see "Backing up virtual machines".

2. In the tree below the Data to back up section, select the items to back up by selecting check boxes next to the items.

   Selecting a check box for a machine means backing up all the machine's disks. To select individual disks and/or volumes, expand the machine item and select check boxes next to the disks and/or volumes.

   Notes for Disks/volumes

   • 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.
   • Note for Linux users: Logical volumes and MD devices are shown under Dynamic volumes. For more information about backing up such volumes and devices, see "Backup and recovery of logical volumes and MD devices (Linux)".
   • Note for Linux users: We recommend that you unmount any volumes that contain non-journaling file systems—such as the ext2 file system—before backing them up. Otherwise, these volumes might contain corrupted files upon recovery; recovery of these volumes with resize might fail.

   Notes for Virtual machines

   • Backing up entire virtual machines comes in handy when having small (in terms of virtual disks size) but numerous legacy servers such as those resulting from workload consolidation. A separate archive will be created for each machine.
   • Backing up individual disks or volumes within a virtual machine comes in handy when the operating system and applications, such as a database server, run on a virtual disk, but the data, such as a database, is stored on a large capacity physical disk added to the same machine. You will be able to use different backup strategies for the virtual disk and the physical storage.
3. Having specified the data to backup, click OK.