Acronis Backup for Windows Server Essentials - User Guide - Manual (Page 151)

151 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
5.3 Acronis Active Restore
Active Restore is the Acronis proprietary technology that brings a system or a database online
immediately after its recovery is started.
This section describes the use of Active Restore during an operating system recovery. While based on
the same technology, recovery of Microsoft Exchange databases or Microsoft SQL databases
proceeds in a different way. For more information, refer to following sections:

When recovering Microsoft Exchange databases, see the "Using Acronis Active Restore for
database recovery" section of the "Backing up Microsoft Exchange Server data" document.

When recovering Microsoft SQL databases, see "Using Acronis Active Restore for SQL database
recovery" (p. 309).
Limitations

Active Restore is meant for instant data recovery on the same machine. It is not available when
recovering to dissimilar hardware.

The only supported archive location is a local drive, or more precisely, any device available
through the machine’s BIOS. This may be Acronis Secure Zone, a USB hard drive, a flash drive or
any internal hard drive.

Active Restore does not support disks with the GPT partitioning style as a source being recovered,
as a recovery destination, or as an archive location. This also means that Unified Extensible
Firmware Interface (UEFI) is not supported. The only supported boot mode is BIOS.
How it works
When configuring a recovery operation, you select disks or volumes to recover from a backup.
Acronis Backup scans the selected disks or volumes in the backup. If this scan finds a supported
operating system, use of Acronis Active Restore becomes available.
If you do not enable Active Restore, the system recovery will proceed in the usual way and the
machine will become operational after the recovery is completed.
If you enable Active Restore, the sequence of actions will be set as follows.
Once the system recovery is started, the operating system boots from the backup. The machine
becomes operational and ready to provide necessary services. The data required to serve incoming
requests is recovered with the highest priority; everything else is recovered in the background.
Because serving requests is performed simultaneously with recovery, the system operation can slow
down even if recovery priority (p. 163) in the recovery options is set to Low. Although the system
downtime is minimal, there may be reduced performance during recovery.
Usage scenarios
1. The system uptime is one of the efficiency criteria.
Examples: Client-oriented online services, Web-retailers, polling stations.
2. The system/storage space ratio is heavily biased toward storage.
Some machines are being used as storage facilities, where the operating system claims a small
space segment and all other disk space is committed to storage, such as movies, sounds or other
multimedia files. Some of these storage volumes can be extremely large as compared to the
system and so practically all the recovery time will be dedicated to recovering the files, which
might be used much later on, if in any near future at all.