Rapid Recovery 6.1.3 - User Guide

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 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 Core, with the following exclusions:

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 RecoveryCore 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 agent machines are saved to the Rapid Recovery Core as recovery points. From these recovery points, you can restore your data using one of three 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. You can do this for only Windows machines. For more information, see About restoring volumes from a recovery point.

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 agent 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, and starting 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 Performing a bare metal restore for Windows machines. If you want to restore from a recovery point of a system volume on a Linux machine, see Performing a bare metal restore for Windows machines.

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 Windows Machines to virtual machines, see VM export.

NOTE: When recovering data on Windows machines, if the volume that you are restoring has Windows data deduplication enabled, you will need to make sure that deduplication is also enabled on the Core server. Rapid Recovery supports Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 for normal transfers (both base and incremental) as well as with restoring data, bare metal restore, and virtual exports. For more information on the types of volumes supported and not supported for backup and recovery, see Support for dynamic and basic volumes.

About the file search and restore feature

The Rapid Recovery file search and restore feature lets you find one or more files in the recovery points of a protected machine. You can then restore one or more of the results to a local disk.

Searching guidelines

On the File Search page of the Core Console, you can search for a file from a set of recovery points from the machine that you select. The search criteria are divided into two groups: basic and advanced.

The basic group includes the following parameters:

NOTE: All basic criteria is required. If no directory is provided, Rapid Recovery searches all volumes of the specified protected machine.

The More Options button reveals the advanced group, which includes the following parameters:

NOTE: Specific search criteria produce faster and more accurate your search results. Including subdirectories (for example, C:\work\documents\accounting instead of C:) reduces the amount of time it takes to complete the search, as does providing restrictive file masks (for example, invoice*.pdf instead of in*.*).

Because the feature continues to search through recovery points and locations even after the requested file is found, you can pause or stop a search before it completes. You can run multiple searches can simultaneously, but you cannot begin them at the same time. For example, to find another file, you can begin a second search while the first search is still in progress. However, you can only search one protected machine at a time.

NOTE: In the previous example, pausing the first search makes more memory available for the second search, which helps the second search finish faster. Running multiple searches at one time is memory intensive and increases the amount of time it takes to complete a search.

Each search appears as a tab on the page. When you are finished searching, you can close the tabs individually or all at once.

Restoring guidelines

After you find the file, you can restore it directly from the File Search page.

The file search and restore feature limits restoring capabilities to only locations on the Core. You cannot restore a file to a protected machine.

Finding and restoring a file

When you want to restore a file instead of a volume, you can use Rapid Recovery to find that file among the recovery points for your protected machine. Search criteria, such as date range and directory, let you narrow the search to a small group of relevant recovery points.

NOTE: Specific search criteria produce faster and more accurate your search results, and consume less memory. Including subdirectories (for example, C:\work\documents\accounting instead of C:) reduces the amount of time it takes to complete the search, as does providing restrictive file masks (for example, invoice*.pdf instead of in*.*).

After you find the file, you can then restore it directly from the list of search results.

Table 142. File search criteria

Search criteria for finding a file from within the recovery points of a protected machine.

Text Box	Description
Machine	Select the protected machine that you want to search from the drop-down list.   NOTE: You can search through the recovery points of only one protected machine at a time.
Recovery points date range	Specify the date and time of the oldest recovery point and the newest recovery point that you want to search. Only the recovery points created within this span of time are searched.   NOTE: The default time span is the previous month. For example, if conducting the search on August 22, 2016 at 2:04 PM, the default date range is 7/22/2016 2:04 PM to 8/22/2016 2:04 PM.
Filename (can use * and ? wildcards)	Enter the name of the file or a file mask for the file that you want to find and restore. Wildcards may be used as substitutes for unknown characters.   NOTE: You can use the "?" wildcard to replace any single character and the "*" wildcard to replace zero or multiple characters.
Directories to search	List one or more directories on the protected machine to limited the search to only those locations.   NOTE: If no directory is provided, Rapid Recovery searches all volumes of the specified protected machine.

Table 143. More file search options

More search criteria for finding a file from within the recovery points of a protected machine.

Text Box	Description
Include subdirectories	Searches all the subdirectories of the directories listed in Step 3. Enabled by default.
Use fast search algorithm for NTFS volumes	Searches NTFS volumes without mounting them by parsing file system data structures, which is faster and consumes less memory while searching. Enabled by default.   NOTE: If you encounter an issue during a search of an NTFS volume, attempt the search again without this option selected.
Limit search results to	Enter the maximum number of results that you want to appear in the results. The default is 1000.