Microsoft Server 2012 R2 - deduplicated volumes
We recently took advantage of the Server 2012 deduplication technology against a file server.
The results have shown that this is a very worthwhile technology.
Microsoft do state that block level backup processes should work.
I ran a full disk image backup last night against the deduplicated volume. The volume appeared to backup fine.
However when trying some random restores to test the integrity of the process, most files were unusable. The file index is all there but the file contents seem to be largely missing.
So it appears that Acronis Backup is NOT compatible with Microsoft Server 2012 R2 deduplication?
Can someone please verify this or possibly hint at what we are doing wrong?
Thanks for the reply and the provided information.
Do you know if there are plans to build in support for Server 2012 deduplication (we do not use Acronis Deduplication)?
For now, disk-level and file-level backup/recovery of deduplicated volumes are possible. File recovery from a disk backup is not supported and there are no plans to support it.
It seems a very strange decision for Acronis to state there are no plans to support what is quite possibly one of the most compelling features of Windows Server 2012 file server capability.
We are currently evaluating Dell AppAssure which is pretty much making Acronis Backup look like an outdated consumer oriented product.
We've been Acronis users for a good number of years now but I fear with the lack of progress we are seeing that relationship is looking increasingly untenable.
Hello simon hulbert,
AppAssure recovers files by mounting disk backups to a file system. I believe you can do the same with Acronis Backup. Mount the backup on the WS 2012 server where Acronis Backup is installed, open the backup with a file manager, and copy the necessary files. This is even easier than using the recovery wizard.
That is a technique that works fine as long as the backups are NOT Server 2012 deduplicated volumes.
As it stands, if the backup is a Server 2012 dedup volume then file level recovery is not possible. Only full disk volume restore will work which of course is untenable when you just need to pull out a few MB's from a 1.6TB file server backup!
Simon, file recovery via mounting does work on Windows Server 2012 deduplicated volumes. When you try to recover, Acronis cannot 'assemble' a file deduped by Windows. When you mount a volume, Windows itself 'assembles' the file.
See the screenshots: file explorer.exe was successfully copied from backup of deduplicated volume dd1. Do you want to say that this does not work on Windows Server 2012 R2?
