Cyber Backup and bare-metal restore

What could possibly break there?

Every year our customers face problems leading to the need for complete (bare-metal) restoration:

Problems in the operation of RAID arrays, errors in the firmware of the controller or disks
Administrator errors, incorrectly replaced disks or errors when replacing disks
Data corruption due to malware, viruses and ransomware
Problems installing operating system updates

What cases in your practice required complete recovery of application and OS data?

Non-virtualized systems need backup no less than virtualized ones. Simple file copying does not allow you to obtain a system image suitable for recovery. If there are dozens of such systems in a company and Windows and Linux are used simultaneously, then solving the problem becomes extremely labor-intensive. Due to the difficulties with backing up the OS in non-virtualized environments, the vast majority of customers refuse to back up the OS and make only simple file copies of configuration files and OS settings. The recovery plan from such a backup involves manual installation and configuration of the OS, installation of backup agents and subsequent file recovery. In practice, this often leads to the fact that only during disaster recovery it becomes clear that some of the necessary configuration files located on system drives were not included in the backup plan. This recovery procedure is complex, not automated, and in practice does not guarantee successful recovery. Therefore, in case of complete loss of data and damage to the OS due to another bug in the SSD firmware Meeting the regulated recovery time (RTO) is extremely difficult.

How the issue is resolved in Cyber Backup

Our Cyber Backup system has functionality for block backup of disks. Setting up backup and restoring OS partitions is as easy as performing a regular file backup. This is configured via the web interface. Most RBSs (including us) support Microsoft VSS, but no one offers such a convenient and functional way to consistently backup file systems of Linux servers. Backup is performed online without stopping the server, and data consistency is achieved through the SnapAPI driver, which is responsible for all Cyber Backup I/O operations. This technology helps to take a snapshot of a block device, similar to what could be done in virtual infrastructures using a hypervisor. Driver SnapAPI During the backup process, it tracks writes to the block device and saves the contents of the modified blocks at the time the backup starts.

Advantages of our solution:

Consistent block backup without stopping the OS for Windows and Linux
Selective recovery of individual files/directories
Support for “always incremental” scheme, deduplication and compression
Blocks that do not contain file system data are not copied by the agent if one of the file systems supported by Cyber Backup
For unsupported file systems and data structures, a full sector-by-sector copy is performed
Ability to convert MBR ↔ GPT disk type and BIOS ↔ UEFI boot mode for Windows OS during recovery

Let’s look at creating a backup and recovery plan with an example.

Setting up a backup plan

In the Cyber Backup management console, create a new backup plan. In the “Select data” field, select “Entire machine” or individual disks of this server. We configure the schedule and other parameters of the backup plan.

Restoring from a backup

Booting from media

Bootable media is prepared by the Media Builder utility, included in the Cyber Backup distribution. Using this utility you can make a bootable ISO or USB Flash disk. Bootable media is a Linux or Win PE based Live CD with a backup agent installed and an intuitive interface for restoring data from a backup.