A3 Emergency Procedures


Problem: You have lost production systems and need to recover from backups taken with Alike.

Solution: Follow the procedures below.

A. Do you have an A3 installation ready, or was it lost during your incident? If your installation is OK, skip to section C. Otherwise, follow procedures A and B below.

Your installation may not be available if your environment is damaged or down. In such cases, you will need to download a new A3 image and configure it:

  1. Download the A2 XVA For Xen, use our XVA and for Hyper-V use our VHD.
  2. Using console option 2, configure networking. 
  3. Verify connectivity & DNS pinging an external website (eg. ping hub.docker.com)
  4. If you cannot ping, stop! Networking to various websites, such as hub.docker.com and quadricsoftware.com, is required to proceed!

B. If you have an ADS (Alike Data Store) on network, attach it now. If your ADS was lost, but you have an ODS, you will need to set up a new, blank ADS.

  1. To configure your Backup Storage (ADS), choose option 2 from the console menu.
  2. Enter the appropriate settings for your CIFS or NFS share. If you do not have an ADS anymore, create a 50GB temporary disk and use "local storage".
  3. Reboot.
  4. To configure your ODS, choose option 2 (Manage Backup Storage) and then select option 2 (Configure Offsite Vault Storage)
  5. Reboot.

Select option 2 for Backup Storage

C. Log into your installation and enable read-only mode

  1. Log in to your local Alike UI using your portal account.
  2. Navigate to Configuration->Manage A3s. Find the "Read-only mode" toggle in the lower right. Enable it.

When presented with the login screen, use the credentials you set up at portal.quadricsoftware.com

D. Hyper-V: Deploy Agent If Needed

  1. The QSBAgent must be installed on any Hyper-V host you wish to restore to.
  2. Download it from https://www.quadricsoftware.com/download/qsbagent_5.exe

When installing the QHBAgent, select the "Hyper-V Server Install" option

E. Add Hosts

  1. Navigate to Environment->Hypervisor Hosts
  2. Use the "Add New Host Server" for any hosts you will need to restore to
  3. Ensure these hosts enumerate properly by clicking on Environment->All Systems and sorting by "Location"
  4. Enumeration may take 5-10 minutes to complete.

Use the "Add Hosts" button to add a new host to restore to, if it's not already configured

F. Begin recovery

  1. Go to Backup->Backup Explorer to recover individual files and download disk images
  2. Go to Backup History or Vault History to begin restoration of entire systems


Select the VM you wish to restore and use the "Restore" icon to begin a restore job.