Rapid Recovery 6.3 - User Guide

Restoring data

This section describes how to restore data from recovery points saved to your repository using Rapid Recovery Core.

Topics include:

About restoring data with Rapid Recovery

The Rapid Recovery Core can instantly restore data or recover machines to physical or virtual machines from recovery points. The recovery points contain agent volume snapshots captured at the block level. These snapshots are application aware, meaning that all open transactions and rolling transaction logs are completed and caches are flushed to disk before creating the snapshot. Using application-aware snapshots in tandem with Verified Recovery enables the Core to perform several types of recoveries, including:

• Recovery of files and folders
• Recovery of data volumes, using Live Recovery
• Recovery of data volumes for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, using Live Recovery
• Bare metal restore, using Universal Recovery
• Bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware, using Universal Recovery
• One-time on demand and continual export to virtual machines

Understanding Live Recovery

Live Recovery is a feature of restoring data in Rapid Recovery Core. If your protected machine experiences data failure of a non-system Windows volume, you can restore data from a recovery point on the Rapid Recovery Core. Selecting Live Recovery in the Restore Machine Wizard allows users to immediately continue business operations with near-zero downtime. Live Recovery during restore gives you immediate access to data, even while Rapid Recovery continues to restore data in the background. This feature allows near-zero recovery-time, even if the restore involves terabytes of data.

Rapid Recovery Core uses unique block-based backup and recovery technology that allows full user access to target servers during the recovery process. Requested blocks are restored on-demand for seamless recovery.

Live Recovery applies to physical and virtual machines protected by Rapid Recovery Agent, with the following exclusions:

• Live Recovery is accessible to Windows volumes, excluding system volumes. The C:\ drive and the system-reserved partition cannot be restored using Live Recovery.
• Live Recovery is accessible to Windows-based volumes using the Rapid Recovery Agent. Agentless volumes or Linux volumes cannot take advantage of Live Recovery.
• Live Recovery is accessible to Windows-based volumes using the Rapid Recovery Agent. Agentless volumes or Linux volumes cannot take advantage of Live Recovery.

Live Recovery lets you instantly restore physical or virtual servers directly from the backup file. When a non-system volume is being restored, Rapid Recovery presents the volume metadata to the operating system instantly, making that data available on demand. For example, if the database volume of Microsoft Exchange is corrupt, Live Recovery can restore the volume, database, and Exchange services in minutes.

This feature provides the fastest method of recovering large quantities of data with minimal downtime. Users can immediately continue business operations.

Once Live Recovery begins, the restored volume and its contents become instantly available. Rapid Recovery Core continues to restore the data in the background, even though the volume, its data, applications and services are already back in production. If specific data is requested, the background process prioritizes the restoration of this data immediately. This powerful functionality allows even the most stringent service-level agreement to be met.

Once you start Live Recovery, metadata (directory structure, security descriptors, NTFS file attributes, free space map, and so on) of the target volume is quickly restored on the protected machine. Thereafter, the volume and its contents become available to the system. The Rapid Recovery Agent begins restoring data blocks from the Rapid Recovery Core server, writing the blocks to the target volume.

Requests for data that has not yet been restored are immediately answered, with the requesting program or system unaware that the blocks were just restored.

Restoring data from recovery points

Rapid Recovery protects your data on Windows and Linux machines. Backups of protected machines are saved to the repository associated with your Rapid Recovery Core as recovery points. From these recovery points, you can restore your data using one of the following methods.

• From the Rapid Recovery Core Console, you can restore entire volumes from a recovery point of a non-system volume, replacing the volumes on the destination machine. This process uses the Restore Machine Wizard. For more information, see About restoring volumes from a recovery point.
• You can also restore entire volumes on Linux machines from recovery points using the command line from the protected Linux machine. For more information on using the command line local_mount utility, see Restoring volumes for a Linux machine using the command line.

When restoring data for agentlessly protected machines only, the Volume Mapping page of the Restore Machine Wizard includes the option Restore all configuration data. This option is associated with the VM configuration and restore feature. For more information, see VMware VM configuration backup and restore.

You cannot restore a volume that contains the operating system directly from a recovery point, because the machine to which you are restoring is using the operating system and drivers that are included in the restore process. If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume (for example, the C drive of the protected machine), you must perform a Bare Metal Restore (BMR). This involves creating a bootable image from the recovery point, which includes operating system and configuration files as well as data. You then start the target machine from that bootable image to complete the restore. The boot image differs if the machine you want to restore uses a Windows operating system or a Linux operating system. If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume on a Windows machine, see . If you want to restore from a recovery point of a system volume on a Linux machine, see Performing a bare metal restore for Linux machines.

If you have a software RAID on a Linux machine protected by Rapid Recovery Agent release 6.2 or later, you can restore the software RAID from a recovery point.

Finally, in contrast to restoring entire volumes, you can mount a recovery point from a Windows machine, and browse through individual folders and files to recover only a specific set of files. For more information, see Restoring a directory or file using Windows Explorer. If you need to perform this while preserving original file permissions (for example, when restoring a user’s folder on a file server), see Restoring a directory or file and preserving permissions using Windows Explorer.

The topics in this section describe information about restoring data on physical machines. For more information on exporting protected data from a recovery point to a virtual machine, see VM export.