Acronis Backup Best Practices

This article is intended as Best Practices for AN! personel in deploying and maintaining the Acronis BaaS product on virtual machines running on an Anvil! platform. All rights, etc, of proprietary products are held by their respective owners.

The purpose of offering BaaS to Alteeve! clients is to provide a AN! supported backup method that is tested and known on Anvil! platforms. While there are many data retention solutions available, Acronis was chosen for it's ease-of-use by the end user and simple management while still retaining robust local and cloud-based backup options. Acronis software is intended to be installed on the client's virtual machines, and only interacts with the Anvil! when a full OS recovery is required. The Anvil! ensures it's own data retention innately via it's Highly Available construction, and does not require Acronis provisioning.

Please remember that Virtual Machines belonging to clients are beyond AN!'s standard line of demarcation. Only access them and their information with explicit permission and only for the required operations, no more!

VM Requirements

A target virtual machine must have A recent OS, defined as:

• Linux kernel >= 2.4.20 and glibc >= 2.3.2 (RHEL 4.x and greater)
• Windows XP Professional SP2+ or more recent
• Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 or more recent
• Access to the internet

To access the BaaS Management Console, the client must use the following, or more recent

• Google Chrome 29
• Mozilla Firefox 23
• Opera 16
• Internet Explorer 10
• Safari 5.1.7 (iOS supported)

Local Backup Destination Requirements

If a client chooses, Acronis can store information in a location other than the cloud storage offered. This can either be a local file, or an accessible network location.

A Local destination may be any file or device connected to the Acronis client machine. As Acronis runs best as a scheduled backup, a removable storage device is not reccomended unless the client can ensure it will be available and connected at the scheduled times. CD or Removable media is not inherently supported, and must be burned or written manually.

A Network Location includes Samba (Windows Shared Directories) or NFS shares mounted on the client machine.

&&TO TEST&& Can autofs mount an nfs share when requested by an acronis backup job?