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application aware backup to online

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Hi,

When I setup backup task in VMP9 to local disk, the "Application aware" settings is available. However, once I changed to Online Storage, the "Application aware" settings became unavailable. Is this a limitation for backing up Online? What happen to my Application database backup (exchange, AD and SQL, etc)?

Thanks,
Aldous

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Aldous,

This is indeed a limitation of backup to online: the application-aware backup is impossible into this type of location (just like it is impossible to FTP). This limitation comes from the specifics of the storage where there is no quick random access possibility and thus it is not possible to run VM from backup from such storage which is why some application items cannot be restored (Exchange mails and mailboxes in particular) and therefore the application-aware backup option is disabled to prevent such cases.

Note that this limitation had always been present - it's the same for vmProtect 8 as well (you cannot do Exchange-aware backup to online).

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager

Hi Vasily,

Thanks for the info.

In fact, my concern is if I have to do a full VM restore from Online archive, will my Exchange database or SQL database work after the restore? I always have local backup and the Online backup is only for total disaster recovery (i.e. local backup not available). Therefore, I only concern about full VM restoration. What is the best practices for backing up Application servers to online to ensure a successful restoration?

Thanks
Aldous

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Posts: 22
Comments: 3800

Hi Aldous,

In short the answer is "yes". The applications inside the full VM backup will be consistent due to usage of quiesced snapshot which triggers VSS and thus brings system to app-consistent state inside the backup. The application-aware option in vmProtect does additional tasks to collect the metadata of installed applications in order to enable granular recovery, so it is kind of 2nd level of protection: there could be cases when quiesced snapshot completes successfully, while VSS was not used inside the VM and therfore it is in crash-consistent state. The application-aware enabling makes sure that VSS writers responsible for supported applications were actually used during the quiesced snapshot.

Therefore the following conclusion can be done: If backup of a VM with application-aware option enabled can be done successfully (no matter where), this means that the backup of the same VM without application-aware option will also be application-consistent (though without granular items recovery).

Thank you.
--
Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis vmProtect Program Manager