User guide

5 Recovery

When it comes to data recovery, first consider the most functional method: connect the console to

the managed machine running the operating system and create the recovery task.

If the machine's operating system fails to start or you need to recover data to bare metal, boot the

machine from the bootable media (p. 229) or using Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and configure

recovery.

Acronis Universal Restore lets you recover and boot up operating systems on dissimilar hardware or

a virtual machine.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 enables you to transfer Windows operating systems between

BIOS-based hardware and hardware that supports Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). See

the "Recovering BIOS-based systems to UEFI-based and back" (p. 114) section for more details.

A Windows system can be brought online in seconds while it is still being recovered. Using the

proprietary Acronis Active Restore (p. 118) technology, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 will boot the

machine into the operating system found in the backup as if the system were on the physical disk.

The system becomes operational and ready to provide necessary services. Thus, the system

downtime will be minimal.

A dynamic volume can be recovered over an existing volume, to unallocated space of a disk group, or

to unallocated space of a basic disk. To learn more about recovering dynamic volumes, please turn to

the "Backup and recovery of dynamic volumes (Windows)" (p. 25) section.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for Windows has the ability to recover a disk (volume) backup

to a new virtual machine of any of the following types: VMware Workstation, Microsoft Virtual PC,

Parallels Workstation, Citrix XenServer Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) or Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual

Machine (KVM). The virtual appliance can then be imported to XenServer. You can move the files of

the Kernel-based Virtual Machine to a machine running Linux; from there, you can run this virtual

machine by using the Virtual Machine Manager program. The VMware Workstation machine can be

converted to the open virtualization format (OVF) using the VMware OVF tool. With Acronis Backup

& Recovery 11 Agent for Hyper-V or Agent for ESX(i), you can create a new virtual machine on the

respective virtualization server.

You might need to prepare target disks before recovery. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 includes a

handy disk management utility which enables you to create or delete volumes, change a disk

partitioning style, create a disk group and perform other disk management operations on the target

hardware, both under the operating system and on bare metal. To find out more about Acronis Disk

Director LV, see "Disk management" (p. 172).

5.1 Creating a recovery task

To create a recovery task, perform the following steps

What to recover

Select data (p. 99)

Select data to recover.

Access credentials (p. 102)