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January 14th, 2025 20:04
Help with backup and restore of laptop computers!
Hello,
I'm a newbie here and am hoping to get pointed in the right direction with this group. We have a DP4400 and are using Data Protection Central 19.11 to backup servers. We want to extend this to desktop computers, but people claim it can't be done. Everything I've read indicates that we can do this, but the sticking point seems to be around the ability to backup and restore the OS, applications, and data. People are telling me we can only backup and restore data. I believe that we should be able to create an entire image using Avamar. My question for this group, am I wrong?
Thank you in advance!
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Sandtitz
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January 20th, 2025 14:02
Hi,
You can backup and restore computers with Avamar agent!
The Dell Avamar Info Hub at https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/us-en/000215768 contains the Backup Clients User Guide for generic information about the supported operating systems, installation and such.
If you are dealing with Windows computers, check the Dell Avamar for Windows Servers 19.XX User Guide.
(despite the name, it also applies to non-server Windows systems)
In short, full recovery after e.g. disk crash is done by first installing the OS on the target device, the the Avamar agent and then recovering everything from the file based backup on Linux and Unix systems. I have no experience with Macs.
For Windows systems Avamar Client comes with two plugins, the File System plugin and VSS plugin:
- File System plugin works on file level and can be used to backup/restore files/folders.
- VSS plugin uses Windows VSS to create an "image" (of sorts) to back up the OS. This backup contains the critical disks and partitions to do a full OS restore. You cannot restore any files or other objects from this backup.
You can/should combine both to a single backup job, so they are run sequentially. All files (on system drive at least) are read twice and backup data is also transferred twice which is very wasteful.
Avamar - like most other commercial backup software - has a Bare Meta Recovery feature where you need to place the BMR iso file contents onto boot media, then boot into a Windows PE environment and use it to recover the VSS backup. This will restore all drives which the Windows ASR component during backup considers critical - so it may omit any other than the C: drive (and the required boot partitions) so you would need to restore the missing drives in Windows after the restore. The BMR boot cannot be used to recover non-Windows systems.
The BMR GUI is low on user friendliness, but it works and I have also used it to virtualize physical computers when I cannot use e.g. VMware Converter. I recommend testing it thoroughly when implementing Avamar client backups since you may have to include laptop's LAN drivers into the the base image. Restoring via wireless network is not possible.