NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers various recovery options to support your business operations and disaster recovery planning:
Granular Recovery
Granular recovery technology allows businesses to instantly recover specific files and objects from image-based backups. With this technology, you don’t need to fully restore a machine to browse for specific files or objects. You can easily recover corrupted or accidentally deleted files or objects, and, you can also recover lost files from backups.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers an Instant File Recovery to Source feature that provides granular recovery for VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS virtual environments. Among its key capabilities are:
Linux and Windows support. Files can be recovered to source machines with Linux or Windows operating systems installed. NTFS, FAT32, EXT3, EXT4, and XFS file systems are supported. You can also use Linux LVM partitions (Logical Volume Management) and Windows dynamic disks. When the source machine is selected as the target for file recovery, you need to enter the credentials for the source machine.
Preservation of file permissions. When you recover files from a backup to the source machine, the Instant File Recovery feature keeps the file permission settings from the original file. This eliminates the need for manual adjustments to ensure that the applications which use those files function properly after the file recovery.
Ease of use. When you launch Instant File Recovery, the recovery point you selected is mounted to the machine (or instance, in the case of EC2) from the backup. Files can be recovered to any machine you choose. You can also download recovered items as a zip archive using your browser.
Security. TLS/SSL-based endpoint verification is used between endpoints to ensure files are transferred securely. The machine backup is not modified.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication also permits recovering Microsoft Exchange emails, Microsoft Active Directory objects, and Microsoft SQL Server objects directly from compressed and deduplicated backups. These features are agentless, work right out of the box, and do not require the creation of a special lab or the need to run a special backup type. The objects can be recovered to a source or another machine.
Starting from version 8.1, NAKIVO Backup & Replication includes the new Universal Object Recovery functionality which provides even more options for recovering file system objects such as files and directories. It provides multiple recovery options, increases the flexibility of the recovery process, and saves lots of time. The benefits of the Universal Object Recovery feature are the following:
- Versatility. You will not be limited to certain applications or file systems. It is possible to recover any object at any time. Also, you can recover individual objects back to the source, to another machine or instance, or even to a physical machine.
- Lower Overhead. You can restore individual objects without having to recover the entire machine. Thus, the feature eliminates the complexity of full recovery, saving you time that can be better used for other important tasks.
- Faster Recovery. With Universal Object Recovery, you can instantly mount machine disks from a backup, decreasing recovery time and ensuring minimal interruption to your business operations.
Full Recovery
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can recover an entire VM in case of hardware and machine failure. The VM will be recovered in the same state as it was during the backup, and will appear on the host selected for recovery. There is no need to manually create the VM, install an OS, and then restore data.
Your Backup Repository can be located anywhere: in your local datacenter or a disaster recovery location accessed via WAN. It can also be located in a cloud.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers cross-platform recovery, allowing you to export virtual disks from VM backups to different formats for further manual recovery of the VMs in different environments. This backup export feature can be useful if one hypervisor goes down and you must recover the VM on another hypervisor that belongs to another platform.
The Flash VM Boot feature allows you to recover an entire VM from the backup within seconds. Flash VM Boot enables booting a VM directly from compressed and deduplicated backup, without recovering the entire VM. The VM can get started in just a few seconds, and it can run directly from the backup. With Flash VM Boot, you can:
Access files and application objects of any application on any OS.
- Test system updates and patches before applying them to production VM.
- Verify the backup and ensure that OS and applications can run properly.
- Copy files to another datastore.
Notes:
- For VMs with multiple network adapters, NAKIVO Backup & Replication attempts recovering a VM by setting the VM networking in the order network adapters are configured on the source VMs.
- To date, the application allows recovering at the VM level but not at the cluster/host level. Therefore, you will need to configure each VM recovery manually. Consider splitting your recovery task into several min-tasks if appropriate.
- If you need to recover a NAKIVO configuration from a Backup Repository when the NAKIVO Director host fails, you can import this Backup Repository to another NAKIVO Director and then follow the standard NAKIVO Backup & Replication system recovery procedure.
Disaster Recovery
To minimize the risk of data loss and downtime in case of a disaster, you can rely on VM replication. Using VM replication, you can recover your virtual infrastructure with minimal interruption to business services. Since VM replication creates a copy of the original VM, resuming the business services is as simple as powering on the replica. In the event of a disaster, your entire virtual infrastructure can be switched over from the primary site to a disaster recovery site.
When the virtual infrastructure at the primary site is restored, you can return the workloads back with the failback process.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers the Site Recovery functionality. It allows you to achieve continuous delivery of IT services by arranging conditions and actions into an automated algorithm. By utilizing this feature, you can create a Site Recovery job that suits your business needs. What's more, you can modify and test it without disrupting the production environment.
For more details, please refer to the Failover to Replica and Site Recovery articles in NAKIVO Backup & Replication User Guide.
The section includes recommendations on the following topics: