Application-aware backup

Application-aware disk-level backup is available for physical machines, ESXi virtual machines, and Hyper-V virtual machines.

When you back up a machine running Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, or Active Directory Domain Services, enable Application backup for additional protection of these applications' data.

Why use application-aware backup?

By using application-aware backup, you ensure that:

1. The applications are backed up in a consistent state and thus will be available immediately after the machine is recovered.
2. You can recover the SQL and Exchange databases, mailboxes, and mailbox items without recovering the entire machine.
3. The SQL transaction logs are truncated after each successful backup. SQL log truncation can be disabled in the protection plan options. The Exchange transaction logs are truncated on virtual machines only. You can enable the VSS full backup option if you want to truncate Exchange transaction logs on a physical machine.
4. If a domain contains more than one domain controller, and you recover one of them, a nonauthoritative restore is performed and a USN rollback will not occur after the recovery.

What do I need to use application-aware backup?

On a physical machine, Agent for SQL and/or Agent for Exchange must be installed, in addition to Agent for Windows.

On a virtual machine, no agent installation is required; it is presumed that the machine is backed up by Agent for VMware (Windows) or Agent for Hyper-V.

Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) can create application-aware backups, but cannot recover application data from them. To recover application data from backups created by this agent, you need Agent for VMware (Windows), Agent for SQL, or Agent for Exchange on a machine that has access to the location where the backups are stored. When configuring recovery of application data, select the recovery point on the Backup storage tab, and then select this machine in Machine to browse from.

Other requirements are listed in the "Prerequisites" and "Required user rights" sections.