Selecting entire machines (disks/volumes) to backup – Acronis

A backup of an entire machine is a backup of all its non-removable disks.

A disk-level backup contains a copy of a disk or a volume in a packaged form. You can recover individual disks, volumes, or files from a disk-level backup.

There are two ways of selecting disks/volumes: directly on each machine or by using policy rules.

Direct selection

Direct selection is available only for physical machines.

1. In What to back up, select Disks/volumes.
2. Click Items to back up.
3. In Select items for backup, select Directly.
4. For each of the machines included in the protection plan, select the check boxes next to the disks or volumes to back up.
5. Click Done.

Using policy rules

1. In What to back up, select Disks/volumes.
2. Click Items to back up.
3. In Select items for backup, select Using policy rules.
4. Select any of the predefined rules, type your own rules, or combine both.
   The policy rules will be applied to all of the machines included in the protection plan. If no data meeting at least one of the rules is found on a machine when the backup starts, the backup will fail on that machine.
5. Click Done.

Rules for Windows, Linux, and macOS

• [All Volumes] selects all volumes on machines running Windows and all mounted volumes on machines running Linux or macOS.

Rules for Windows

• Drive letter (for example C:\) selects the volume with the specified drive letter.
• [Fixed Volumes (physical machines)] selects all volumes of physical machines, other than removable media. Fixed volumes include volumes on SCSI, ATAPI, ATA, SSA, SAS, and SATA devices, and on RAID arrays.
• [BOOT+SYSTEM] selects the system and boot volumes. This combination is the minimal set of data that ensures recovery of the operating system from the backup.
• [Disk 1] selects the first disk of the machine, including all volumes on that disk. To select another disk, type the corresponding number.

Rules for Linux

• /dev/hda1 selects the first volume on the first IDE hard disk.
• /dev/sda1 selects the first volume on the first SCSI hard disk.
• /dev/md1 selects the first software RAID hard disk.

To select other basic volumes, specify /dev/xdyN, where:

• “x” corresponds to the disk type
• “y” corresponds to the disk number (a for the first disk, b for the second disk, and so on)
• “N” is the volume number.

To select a logical volume, specify its path as it appears after running the ls /dev/mapper command under the root account. For example:

[root@localhost ~]# ls /dev/mapper/
control vg_1-lv1 vg_1-lv2

This output shows two logical volumes, lv1 and lv2, that belong to the volume group vg_1. To back up these volumes, enter:

/dev/mapper/vg_1-lv1
/dev/mapper/vg-l-lv2

Rules for macOS

• [Disk 1] Selects the first disk of the machine, including all volumes on that disk. To select another disk, type the corresponding number.