Acronis Backup for Windows Server Essentials - User Guide - Manual (Page 152)

152 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
If you opt for Acronis Active Restore, the system will be operational in a short time. Users will be
able to open the necessary files from the storage and use them while the rest of the files, which
are not immediately necessary, are being recovered in the background.
Examples: movie collection storage, music collection storage, multimedia storage.
How to use
1. Back up the system disk or volume to a location accessible through the system’s BIOS. This may
be Acronis Secure Zone, a USB hard drive, a flash drive or any internal hard drive.
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.
2. Create bootable media.
3. If a system failure occurs, boot the machine using the bootable media. Start the console and
connect to the bootable agent.
4. Create a recovery task (p. 131). In What to recover, make sure that the system disk or volume is
selected for recovery.
Acronis Active Restore will choose for the boot-up and subsequent recovery the first operating system
found during the backup scan. Do not try to recover more than one operating system using Active Restore if
you want the result to be predictable. When recovering a multi-boot system, choose only one system
volume and boot volume at a time.
5. In Where to recover, make sure that the system disk or volume is mapped to the first disk. If it is
not, map it manually as described in "Selecting target disks" (p. 138).
6. In Acronis Active Restore, select Use.
7. Once the system recovery is started, the operating system boots from the backup. The Acronis
Active Restore icon appears in the system tray. The machine becomes operational and ready to
provide necessary services. The immediate user sees the drive tree and icons and can open files
or launch applications even though they were not yet recovered.
The drivers of Acronis Active Restore intercept system queries and set the immediate priority for
recovery of the files that are necessary to serve the incoming requests. While this on-the-fly
recovery proceeds, the continuing recovery process is transferred to the background.
Please do not shut down or reboot the machine until the recovery is completed. If you switch off the
machine, all the changes made to the system since the last boot up will be lost. The system will not be
recovered, not even partially. The only possible solution in this case will be to restart the recovery process
from a bootable media.
8. The background recovery continues until all the selected volumes are recovered, the log entry is
made and the Acronis Active Restore icon disappears from the system tray.
5.4 Bootability troubleshooting
If a system was bootable at the time of backup, you expect that it will boot after recovery. However,
the information the operating system stores and uses for booting up may become outdated during
recovery, especially if you change volume sizes, locations or destination drives. Acronis Backup
automatically updates Windows loaders after recovery. Other loaders might also be fixed, but there
are cases when you have to re-activate the loaders. Specifically when you recover Linux volumes, it is
sometimes necessary to apply fixes or make booting changes so that Linux can boot and load
correctly.
Below is a summary of typical situations that require additional user actions.