Discover backups from another machine
BackupAssist Classic allows you to restore or download from backups created by another machine. This is important for disaster recovery where the original system is no longer available, and provides flexibility for countless use cases - e.g. when recovery is done by a different team in a different location.
The Discover Backups process works with backups in local, external, network, and even cloud storage.
How does it work
Every backup is stored along with necessary meta-data to start a recovery process without needing access to the backup job configurations.
This independence from the backup jobs allows one to discover and load backups from an external drive, network share, iSCSI target, or even a cloud container. Once the backups meta-data are loaded to the running BackupAssist Classic application, you can carry out any form of files and applications recovery, and even download an image backup from a cloud container to carry out a BMR or VM Instant Boot.
Note: No encryption key details are ever saved with the backup to ensure privacy of your backups. You will be prompted to enter the password when proceeding with restoring from a discovered backup
Discover Backups process
The following steps explain how to Discover Backups created by another machine:
- Discover Backups dialog
- Show backups made by existing jobs: Allows you to filter out backups created by local backup jobs from any restore or download backup list.
- Show backups made by deleted jobs: Allows you to filter out backups created by deleted backup jobs from any restore or download backup list.
- Show manually added backups: Allows you to filter out backups that were found through the discover backups process from any restore or download backup list.
- '+' Browse and Add Backups
- Selecting the '+' button will open a Browse for Files and Folders dialog. You can navigate to find the location which you want to load backups from.
- Selecting the Cloud '+' button will open a Discover Cloud Backup dialog. You can configure the cloud container that you want to load backups from.
- Recover or Download from Discovered Backups
After pressing the Discover Backups button from any of the restore or download backup screens, the Discover Backups dialog will load.
By default, no backups will be listed in the backups list box until you have manually added them through one of the two '+' buttons to the right of the dialog.
This dialog has the following check-boxes:
After completing the process of manually adding backups from a local or cloud storage, you can now return to the backup list tabs in to select the backup that you wish to recover or download from.