Release notes for Acronis Backup Cloud 5.0

Release date: February 29, 2016

Overview

With version 5.0, the Acronis flagship backup product offers enhancements and addresses issues found in the previous releases.

What's new in version 5.0

Service management

• Centralized backup status and history. The service providers now have an ability to monitor the backup status of their customers. The seven-day backup health history is displayed for all end-user companies in the management console.
• Quotas for the numbers of protected machines. The service providers can set "hard" quotas and overage for the number of workstations, servers, and virtual machines that a company/account is allowed to back up.
• Custom service offerings based on the types of protected machines. The service providers now have an ability to limit the functionality that is available to their customers. If the quota and overage are set to zero, the corresponding functionality is hidden from customers.
• In-product purchase links. Service providers can enable the "Buy more" links that are displayed in the notification emails, the management console, and in the backup console alerts. These links can be customized on the Branding page.
• International email address format. Email addresses support Cyrillic, Chinese and other language characters. To enable international email, specify an SMTPUTF8-aware SMTP server on the Branding page.
• Large Scale Recovery. Additionally to the Initial Seeding functionality, the partners can now provide Large Scale Recovery to their customers by using the IS/LSR tool.

Virtualization

• Recovery to a new VM. Define a new name and exact location for machines that are recovered as VMs (Hyper-V and ESXi).
• VM Flashback (incremental restore). The fastest possible VM recovery technology. Only the changes between current VM state and its state within the backup are recovered. Both Hyper-V and ESXi platforms are supported.
• New platform support: Virtuozzo. Agent-less backup and recovery (including file recovery) of Virtuozzo virtual machines and containers.
• Run a VM from a backup (instant recovery) and move it to production without downtime. The ability to run an ESXi or Hyper-V virtual machine from a locally stored backup of a virtual or physical machine, for validation or disaster-recovery purposes. An ESXi machine running from a backup can be converted to a regular virtual machine without downtime.
• Application items recovery from a VM backup. Application-aware agent-less backup of ESXi virtual machines running Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange enables browsing and recovery of databases without recovering the entire machine.
• Application-aware backup of VMs with Microsoft Active Directory. Application-aware agent-less backup of ESXi virtual machines running Microsoft Active Directory prevents the possibility of a USN rollback after a recovery of a domain controller.
• Enhanced hypervisor management. The ability to view vSphere and Hyper-V environments in the native hypervisor-specific presentation.
• Change vCenter/ESXi password without reinstallation. The ability to change the vCenter or ESXi host connection password in the backup console.
• Flexible backup configuration. More backup options:
  • CBT. Changed Block Tracking (CBT) for both Hyper-V and ESXi virtual machines.
  • Choose between crash-consistent and application-consistent snapshots. New “Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for virtual machines” backup option to enable or disable quiescing using hypervisor tools. Supports both Hyper-V and ESXi virtual machines.
  • Intelligent snapshot failure handling. Re-attempt, if an error occurs when creating a virtual machine snapshot. Supports both Hyper-V and ESXi virtual machines.
• More recovery options:
  • VM power management.

Monitoring

• Centralized view for activities. The new Activities tab enables viewing and auditing activities from all machines in a single place. Each account has a view scoped to their area of control.
• Improved problem detection via alerts. The alerts system was significantly reworked to improve the alert visibility and simplify the alert management. The new Alerts tab was added. Alerts are raised not only on errors or failures, but also on frozen, missed, or corrupted backups, exceeded quotas. Once a problem is resolved, the alert is automatically dismissed.

Backup

• Self-service backup monitor. Backup monitor (in a Windows taskbar or an OS X menu bar) enables the end users to control the backup process:
  • Protect the machine with a single click immediately after the agent installation.
  • View the backup progress.
  • Prevent the backups from running.
• Backup replication. The ability to replicate backups to a local folder or to a network share. Separate retention rules can be applied to the second destination.
• Advanced backup schemes. The ability to choose a backup scheme (Always full; Weekly full, Daily incremental; Custom) when configuring a disk-level backup to a local or a network folder.
• Advanced backup on demand. The ability to create a backup plan without a predefined schedule and to disable a schedule for an existing backup plan. The plans with the disabled schedule can be run manually.
• Flexible backup configuration. The new backup options give you more control over the backup process:
  • Backup consolidation
  • Backup splitting
  • Compression level
  • Fast incremental/differential backup
  • File-level security
  • Task failure handling

Recovery

• Simplified P2V and V2P migration. The ability to recover backups of physical machines as virtual machines and vice versa by using the backup console.
• Enhanced backups management. The new Backups tab enables browsing and management of locally stored backups, including backups of machines which are no longer present in the backup console. Each account has a view scoped to their area of control.
• More recovery options:
  • Restart the machine automatically after a recovery is finished.

Other

• Backup agents and bootable media now support HTTP proxy servers.
• It is now possible to delete a single backup.
• The backup agent setup language can now be selected in the setup program.
• Usability fixes and improvements. The user interface was improved to simplify the backup and recovery configuration.

Fixed issues

This section describes issues that have been fixed in version 5.0.

• [ABR-67597] Sorting machines by “status” displays the machines in the incorrect order.
• [ABR-70692] Validation of encrypted cloud backups completes with warnings.
• [ABR-71498] Agent uninstallation in Windows sometimes fails.
• [ABR-72609] Passwords containing the quotation mark (“) are not supported.
• [ABR-72640] USB-based locations are not shown on the Recovery pane.
• [ABR-83358] The recovery partition remains mounted after a backup in OS X. Creating the bootable media fails.
• [ABR-84904] The sysinfo.zip file cannot be opened by using the default Windows Server 2003 archiver.
• [ABR-86379] Activities are not shown during the machine recovery that requires a reboot.
• [ABR-87620] SMB network shares with spaces and other special symbols in the path cannot be used as a backup destination in OS X.
• [MSP-7746] URL branding does not work for URLs with prefixes.
• [MSP-7824] When a quota for an account is exceeded, the notification email message contains information about the group instead of the account information.
• [MSP-8396] File-level recovery from an encrypted backup sometimes fails.
• [MSP-8230] Email notifications do not show the login, if the first name and the last name are not specified for the account.
• [MSPLO-1014] Formatting of numbers, dates, and time for Dutch language is incorrect.
• [MSP-7160] If a logo resolution is more than 192x62, the logo is not resized in the branded email messages.
• [MSP-7289] The "Backupagent upgrade" property is visible to administrators.

Known issues

This section describes issues that are currently known and provides solutions to avoid the issues where possible.

• [ABR-64978] File exclusions are supported for Linux, but a disk-level backup to cloud with file exclusions succeeds with a "File exclusion is not supported" warning.
• [ABR-71433] The "Loading" status is shown continuously if a network request to the backup service has timed out.
• [ABR-71590] File-level recovery from a backup of a Linux machine fails in bootable media occasionally fails.
• [ABR-75000] Application-aware backup of a virtual machine with enabled User Account Control (UAC) fails with the "Access is denied" error.
• [ABR-84078] Recovery of a virtual machine with volumes managed by Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to a new or a non-original virtual machine fails.
• [ABR-84554] If a Windows user without the administrator rights registers the agent by using the register_msp_mms.exe tool, all backups of the machine will fail.
• [ABR-85997] The Flashback recovery option does not work for virtual machines with volumes managed by Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
• [ABR-86245] Unit administrator accounts are shown as groups in the backup console.
• [ABR-86438] A machine that was recovered with reboot multiple times in a row does not boot.
• [ABR-87953] If multiple password-protected network shares are backed up by a single backup plan, only one of them is included in the backup, but no warning is shown.
• [ABR-87772] Encrypted backups are shown as non-encrypted on the Backups tab.
• [ABR-87961] Old backup plans cannot be re-applied to a virtual machine after Agent for VMware is uninstalled, and then re-installed.
• [MSP-7138] XFS-formatted volumes cannot be browsed in web restore.
• [MSP-7526] The "Administrators" and "Companies" tabs sometimes appear when an EUC group is selected in the management console.