To protect against user error, disk, or total system failure, you can back up and protect all local NTFS volumes, including system/boot, to a local and/or cloud storage destination. The backup agent lets you back up servers, desktops, or laptops as volume-level images.
Requirement: A backup agent must be installed on each physical machine that needs protection.
Physical Imaging Standard backup allows you to:
- Create virtual machines from restored VHDs for physical-to-virtual recovery.
- Recover from image backups on local storage and bare metal restore (BMR) in minutes.
Physical Imaging Standard backups use the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) driver to keep track of the changes made on the VMs over time.
CBT reduces the time needed to identify changes that need to be backed up. The entirety of a VM’s disks no longer need to be scanned to find what has changed. All changes are tracked and served to the agent as soon as the backup starts.
Subsequent backups are incremental containing only the changes detected by the CBT driver.
Note that full backups are performed by default at every 21st successful backup.
Any Physical Imaging Standard backups taken in previous versions of the Agent, before the introduction of the CBT driver, can be restored.
CBT makes Physical Imaging Standard more consistent with Hyper-V Standard, Hyper-V Rapid Recovery and VMware, which also use CBT.
Physical Imaging Standard provides the following restore options:
- Restore to VHD/X Files
- Restore to Hyper-V Virtual Machine
- Restore via Bare Metal Recovery
Volume capacity limits
Physical Imaging Standard supports volumes up to 64 TB.
Volume Shadow Copy Service
The Physical Imaging feature uses volume shadow copy service (VSS) to quiesce the system on backup. All VSS writers are involved in this process. Ensure the writers are in a correct state before running a backup. See Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) for more information.