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Backing up a virtual machine means backing up all the machine's disks plus the machine
configuration. With this source type, you can back up multiple machines. This comes in handy when
having small (in terms of virtual disks size) but numerous legacy servers such as those resulting from
workload consolidation. A separate archive will be created for each machine.
Volumes of a virtual machine
Available if Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Hyper-V (or for ESX/ESXi) is installed.
Select this option to back up individual disks or volumes within a virtual machine residing on a
virtualization server.
With this source type, you select the machine and then select the disks/volumes to back up. This
comes in handy when the operating system and applications, such as a database server, run on a
virtual disk, but the data, such as a database, is stored on a large capacity physical disk added to the
same machine. You will be able to use different backup strategies for the virtual disk and the physical
storage.
6.2.5
Items to back up
The items to backup depend on the source type (p. 208) selected previously.
6.2.5.1
Selecting disks and volumes
To specify disks/volumes to back up
1.
Select the check boxes for the disks and/or volumes to back up. You can select a random set of
disks and volumes.
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.
In Linux, logical volumes and MD devices are shown under Dynamic and GPT. For more
information about backing up such volumes and devices, see “Backing up LVM volumes and MD
devices (Linux) (p. 46)”.
2.
[Optional] To create an exact copy of a disk or volume on a physical level, select the Back up
sector-by-sector check box. The resulting backup will be equal in size to the disk being backed up
(if the Compression level option is set to None). Use the sector-by-sector backup for backing up
drives with unrecognized or unsupported file systems and other proprietary data formats.
3.
Click OK.
What does a disk or volume backup store?
For supported file systems, with the sector-by-sector option turned off, a disk or volume backup
stores only those sectors that contain data. This reduces the resulting backup size and speeds up the
backup and recovery operations.
Windows
The swap file (pagefile.sys) and the file that keeps the RAM content when the machine goes into
hibernation (hiberfil.sys) are not backed up. After recovery, the files will be re-created in the
appropriate place with the zero size.
A volume backup stores all other files and folders of the selected volume independent of their
attributes (including hidden and system files), the boot record, the file allocation table (FAT) if it
