Key Components

The main software components of Arcserve Backup are as follows (in alphabetical order):

Archive

The Archive Manager lets you customize your archive jobs using filters, specifying options, and setting schedules.

You can use the Archive Manager to:

• Set archive schedules and policies for selected Windows, UNIX/Linux, and MAC file system data.
• Submit archive jobs.
• Find data that is eligible for archiving and backing up, and then delete the archived data from its original location immediately.
• Use filters to selectively exclude or include directories and files for an archive job.
• Specify the File Size and File Age for an archive job.
• Set retention time to the archived data for how long to keep data in the archive media.
• Retrieve archive data from archive media with restore job.
• View archive status through Dashboard reports.

Backup

Arcserve Backup enables you to perform a complete system backup of all network machines. The integrity of the network system information (such as registry information for each machine) is ensured, allowing you to completely restore the machine in the event of a system failure.

Information about each backup job (such as the path and name of each file and the media used) is logged in the Arcserve Backup database. This is useful to restore your files to their original machine and path. Depending on your requirements, you can choose to log all information or only job and session information.

Backup to Cloud

Arcserve Backup provides the ability to migrate backup data to cloud storage. With backup to cloud, you can do the following:

• Configure cloud connections which contains information that lets Arcserve Backup communicate with specified cloud vendors and in addition, it gives you access to cloud storage services through applications that are on your current server.
• Create and manage cloud-based devices where you can direct Arcserve Backup to store data with the cloud vendor specified by the Arcserve Backup cloud connection, format, erase, set cloud-based devices to online or offline, and specify compression on cloud-based devices.

Centralized Management

You can centrally manage multiple Arcserve Backup host servers from a single Arcserve Backup Manager, allowing you to:

• Back up, copy, and restore any machine and other servers in your network from one console.
• Group preferred Arcserve Backup servers.
• View job status.
• Monitor active jobs.
• View activity logs.
• Administer the various Arcserve Backup host database systems from a single console.
• Customize reports using the Manager reporting system.

Database

The Database Manager provides information from the Arcserve Backup database, such as the jobs processed by Arcserve Backup, the media used by Arcserve Backup, and the devices you are using with Arcserve Backup. You can also generate reports from the database.

Deduplication

Data deduplication is technology that allows you to fit more backups on the same physical media, retain backups for longer periods of time, and speed up data recovery. Deduplication analyzes data streams sent to be backed up, looking for duplicate "chunks." It saves only unique chunks to disk. Duplicates are tracked in special index files.

Device

Using the Device Manager, you can view information about your storage devices and media, change a drive's compression mode, and perform media maintenance functions such as formatting, erasing, and retensioning.

Job Status

The Job Status Manager allows you to monitor all pending, completed, and active jobs from a single view. You can also reschedule pending or completed jobs; submit new jobs; delete existing jobs; and stop active jobs. Additionally, log information is provided for each completed job.

Media Pool Management

With the Media Pool Manager, you can manage your media by creating and maintaining media pools for a logical grouping of media. Serial numbers and bar codes can also be assigned to a particular media to help manage your rotations.

Restore

Arcserve Backup restores data from media using a variety of intelligent restore techniques, including rapid lookup and retrieval of lost data. Each time you run a backup job, Arcserve Backup records information in its databases about the machines, directories, and files that have been backed up, and the media that were used. This allows Arcserve Backup to locate files whenever you need to restore them. Arcserve Backup provides you with four methods for selecting the data you want to restore (the source), and also several methods for selecting a Destination to restore the data to the machine. In addition, backing up data through RAID can increase the throughput and ensure fault tolerance of your backup job.

Synthetic Full Backup

Synthetic full backup lets you synthesize a previous full session and its subsequent incremental sessions to a full backup session.

Using the synthetic full backup option you can:

• Enable synthetic full backup and select synthetic schedule.
• Synthesize incremental sessions to a new synthetic full backup session.
• Generate a real full backup based on the synthetic schedule for data assurance.
• Run a real full backup on the next full backup day without waiting for the scheduled full backup to run.
• Submit an on-demand synthetic full backup job without waiting for the scheduled data synthetic job to run.
• Allow scans of synthetic full backup sessions for data assurance.
• Migrate synthetic full backup sessions to tape, cloud, and disk devices using disk staging.
• Utilize disaster recovery and Point-in-Time restoration; you can perform a disaster recovery using a synthetic full backup session without referring to the previous full/incremental sessions.
• Perform Point-in-Time restores.

Synthetic full backup is supported on the following applications and platforms:

• Client Agent for Windows—All Windows platforms supported by the Arcserve Backup Client Agent for Windows.
• Arcserve Backup server component—All operating systems supported by the Arcserve Backup base product.

Notes:

• Synthetic Full Backup is a Job type that you can submit from primary servers, member servers, and stand-alone servers. You can only submit synthetic full backup jobs to disk staging and data deduplication devices. However, you can migrate synthetic full backup sessions to tape media, cloud storage, and disk devices using disk staging operations.
• To perform synthetic full backup jobs, you must install and license the Arcserve Backup Agent for Open Files on the computers that you want to back up.

Virtualization

Arcserve Backup integrates with VMware vSphere and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V so that you can perform image-level and file-level backups and restores of virtual machines data. With the Agent for Virtual Machines you can perform file-level restores from image-level backups.

Wizards

For users who want to initiate a job without having to launch the Arcserve Backup Manager, Arcserve Backup comes standard with independent wizards for its main operations. Similar to other wizard software, the Arcserve Backup wizards take the user step-by-step to complete the specific task. Using the wizards can be an alternative operation to save time and complications in performing a backup job.