Alike A3/V7 Documentation

Welcome to the Alike documentation

Restore Options

The Alike A3 suports four different ways to restore data: Instant Restore, File-level Restore, VHD/X Restore, and Full Restore.

Instant Restore

Instant Restore is available in DR edition and allows near-instantaneous boot of VMs to Xen environments. Ideal for testing and emergencies, insta-boot VMs run on a small internal A3 SR. For long-term production use, always migrate your VM off this "spare tire" SR, as it's not designed for long-term production service!

You can select the Instant Restore job type here:

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After selecting Instant Restore, a wizard will walk you through selecting your backup to boot and the Xen host you want to use. Insta-boot also allows you to select a sandbox xen network to prevent IP conflicts and other issues, if desired.

File-Level Restore and RestoreFS

The A3 features a convenient way to restore image files as well as indivual files quickly, without running a job.

  1. Browse to the UNC network path \\your.a2.ip\restore.
  2. Use your Alike user account to log in (see Advanced topics here).
  3. From here, you should see one or two directories. One if you have offsite vaulting disabled, two if you have it enabled.
  4. Browse into the directory of your choice.
  5. Here your should see a list of all your VMs. Browse in to see a list of backup timestamps.
  6. Browse in to see a directory containing VHDX, VHD, IMG, and file-level restore directories.
  7. You can browse into these directories, corrisponding to disks, to recover indivual files.

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VHD, VHDX, and IMG access

Alike's restoreFS renders IMG, VHD, and VHDX files representing each of your backup's disks. These files are generated on-demand out of Alike's deduplicated data store. You can copy these files out of the restoreFS as needed.

Full Restore

Full restores can be run from a job within Alike.

  1. Select Job->Create New Job->Restore OR select Systems->Protected Systems->[Click on a VM]->[Choose a Backup]->Restore Full VM.
  2. Select the hypervisor host you wish to restore to.
  3. Additional options are described below.

Preserve Source MAC: Use this option to preserve the original MAC of the machine, if possible.

Boot Target when Complete: Use this option to boot the machine when the restore is finished.

Restore from Offsite, when Available: Use this option to prefer offsite storage for restores. This is useful when you want to fire-drill offsite backups.

Full restores always restore all disks protected during backup. If you need to restore only certain disks, please consider using Instant Restore to recover the entire machine, and then Xen Migrate to move only the disks you need to your production SR.