Startup Recovery Manager

Startup Recovery Manager is a bootable component that resides on your hard drive. With Startup Recovery Manager, you can start the bootable rescue utility without using a separate bootable media.

Startup Recovery Manager is especially useful for traveling users. If a failure occurs, reboot the machine, wait for the prompt Press F11 for Acronis Startup Recovery Manager… to appear, and then press F11. The program starts and you can perform recovery. On machines with the GRUB boot loader installed, select the Startup Recovery Manager from the boot menu, instead of pressing F11 during a reboot.

You can also back up using Startup Recovery Manager, while on the move.

To use Startup Recovery Manager, you must activate it. Thus, you enable the boot-time prompt Press F11 for Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (or add the Startup Recovery Manager item to the GRUB menu if you use the GRUB boot loader).

To activate Startup Recovery Manager on a machine with non-encrypted system volume, the machine must have at least 100 MB of free space. Recovery operations that require machine restart need additional 100 MB.

You can activate Startup Recovery Manager on a machine that has a BitLocker-encrypted volume if the machine has at least one other non-encrypted volume. The non-encrypted volume must have at least 500 MB of free space. For recovery operations that require machine restart, the machine must have additional 500 MB of free space.

If Startup Recovery Manager cannot be activated, the backup operations that create One-click recovery backups will fail.

Unless you use the GRUB boot loader and it is installed in the Master Boot Record (MBR), Startup Recovery Manager activation overwrites the MBR with its own boot code. Thus, you may need to reactivate third-party boot loaders if such boot loaders are installed.

In Linux, when using a boot loader other than GRUB (such as LILO, for example), consider installing it to a Linux root (or boot) partition boot record instead of the MBR, before activating Startup Recovery Manager. Otherwise, reconfigure the boot loader manually after the activation.

Activating Startup Recovery Manager

On a machine running Agent for Windows or Agent for Linux, you can activate Startup Recovery Manager in the Cyber Protect web console.

To activate Startup Recovery Manager in the Cyber Protect web console

  1. Select the machine that you want to activate Startup Recovery Manager on.
  2. Click Details.
  3. Enable the Startup Recovery Manager switch.
  4. Wait while the software activates Startup Recovery Manager.

To activate Startup Recovery Manager on a machine without an agent

  1. Boot the machine from bootable media.
  2. Click Tools > Activate Startup Recovery Manager .
  3. Wait while the software activates Startup Recovery Manager.

Deactivating Startup Recovery Manager

To deactivateStartup Recovery Manager, repeat the activation procedure and select the respective opposite actions. The deactivation disables the boot-time prompt Press F11 for Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (or the menu item in GRUB).

If Startup Recovery Manager is not activated, you will need one of the following to recover the system when it fails to boot:

  • boot the machine from a separate bootable media
  • use network boot from a PXE server or Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS)