Acronis Backup for VMware 9 - User Guide - Manual (Page 9)

9 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2013
3 How Acronis Backup for VMware Works
3.1 Virtual machines backup and restore
As with a physical machine, your virtual machine (or several VMs as a whole virtual infrastructure)
should also be protected. Once you have installed Acronis Backup for VMware agent, you can:

Back up a virtual machine or multiple virtual machines residing on the server without having to
install additional software on each virtual machine.

Recover a virtual machine to the same or another virtual machine residing on the same server or
on another virtualization server. The virtual machine configuration stored in a virtual machine
backup and the virtual disks data will be restored to a new virtual machine.
A virtual machine can be online (running), offline (stopped), suspended, or switched between the
three states during backup.
A virtual machine has to be offline (stopped) during the recovery to this machine. The machine will
be automatically stopped before recovery. You can opt for manual stopping of machines.
The detailed information can be found in the “Creating a backup of virtual machines” (p. 36) and
“Restoring a backup of virtual machines” sections (p. 59).
3.2 Backup archive structure
Acronis Backup for VMware allows you to create the backup of virtual machines by using one of the
two backup archive schemes: Multiple files backup scheme (Legacy mode) or Single file backup
scheme (Always Incremental mode).
In Acronis Backup for VMware, the Single file backup scheme is set as the default.
3.2.1 Multiple files backup scheme (Legacy mode)
With this scheme, the data for each backup is stored in a separate archive file (.tib extension). A full
backup is created at the first launch. The following backups are performed according to the
incremental method.
Set up the backup retention rules and specify the appropriate settings. The outdated backups, i.e.
backups older than the designated number of days (defined by the retention rules) are deleted
dynamically in compliance with the following procedure:
Note that it is not possible to delete a backup which has dependencies. For example, if you have a
full backup plus a set of incremental backups, you cannot simply delete the full backup. If you do, the
incremental backups will not be recoverable. The backups which become subject to deletion
(according to the retention rules) will not be deleted until all the dependent backups also become
deletable. This limitation can be overcome by utilizing the Always Incremental backup mode.