Disaster Recovery - New Hardware

Hi,

I'm about to install Acronis TrueImage Enterprise Server at a customer of mine but I need some answers first.

Lets say that I take an Image of an server today, this server later crashes and cannot be recovered. We buy a new server with different hardware specifications, like bigger disks, different graphics card, network card and so on, than the old server.

If I try to restore my Image onto the new hardware, how does Acronis handle this. If the image contains drivers to components that no longer exits, will it just use the windows default ?

Any manuals, links, tips are welcome...

Thank you

PaG

 

Hello PaG,

Thank you for yuor interest in Acronis Remote Server Backup Software.

Before you clone or transfer Windows to another server, you must prepare it with Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep). The reasons to do this are described in the 298491 article of Microsoft Knowledge Base: “One problem from duplicating an installation of Windows 2000 is that each cloned computer has the same security identifier (SID) and computer name. This may prevent the cloned computers from functioning correctly in a workgroup or a domain. To work around this problem, administrators use the System Preparation Tool (Sysprep.exe) to remove configuration settings that are unique to the computer such as the computer name and SID." This problem also relates to Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP, so you should prepare these OS in a similar way.

Please also read the User's Guide (FAQ: How can I prepare Windows NT, 2000 or 2003 for cloning or transferring to a server with different hardware?).

Thank you.
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Irina Shirokova

 

This doesnt really do much for disaster recovery, since the system is no longer bootable at that point. I suppose one could make a sysprep'd image prior to a crash in anticipation of that one day, although the image would likely be horribly outdated by the time you go to use it, let alone the storage space required to hold the image in safe keeping. Acronis needs to develop something like what symantec has which allows any image to be restored to any hardware type at any point without foresight. During the image restoration process it retargets the volume for new hardware by manually removing these sid's and driver settings itself.

 

How does one handle a situation where the original equipment is gone....? When replacement equipment is acquired, can one do anything with the last backup image
from the now unavailable equipment?

Thanks for your guidance.

JWegge

 

Hello JWegge,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

I would recommend you to follow one of the below described approaches in case you have the beforehand created image of the computer which is not available any more for some reason (e.g. it is irretrievably damaged on the hardware level):

1.) Restore the image of the "old" computer's hard drive to the new machine.

As Irina has already mentioned above, it is recommended to prepare your operating system using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep) as it is described in this FAQ article prior to creating an image in case you plan to restore this image to the machine with the hardware configuration that differs from that of the original computer.

Please also note that you should create an image of the entire hard drive by checking the tickbox near the hard drive's name (see respective screen shot in section 4.2 of Acronis True Image 9.0 User's Guide), since only the image of the entire hard drive contains MBR which is "responsible" for your hard drive to be bootable.

In case the restored operating system does not boot you can also try performing Windows Repair Installation as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Please be aware that we do not guarantee the successful transferring of your operating system to a different hardware, even in case of using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep).

2.) Install a new operating system on the new machine, install Acronis True Image, mount your image archive as a virtual drive by means of the embedded Plug Image Tool (the same as Explore Image Tool in version 8.0) and then restore individual files and folders.

Please be aware that in this case you might face the known problem described in this FAQ article.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or report any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov