Dell Appassure 5 User Guide

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Generating and viewing reports
This chapter provides an overview of reporting available in Dell AppAssure. It consists of the following topics:
•Understanding Compliance reports
•Understanding Failure reports
•Understanding the Summary report
•Generating a report for a core or agent
•Understanding Central Management Console core reports
•Generating a report from the Central Management Console
AppAssure lets you generate and view compliance, error, and summary information for multiple core and agent 
machines.
You can choose to view reports online, print reports, or export and save them in one of several supported 
formats. The formats from which you can choose are:
•PDF
•XLS
•XLSX
•RTF
•MHT
•HTML
•TXT
•CSV
•Image
With this release of AppAssure, reports now include units of measure which make it easier to determine if a 
column is represented in GB, TB, or in seconds. 
						

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Using the reports toolbar
The toolbar available for all reports lets you print and save in two different ways. The following table describes 
the print and save options.
For information about generating a report, see Generating a report for a core or agent. For information about 
the generating a report for multiple cores in the Central Management Console, see Generating a report from the 
Central Management Console. For information about generating cluster reports, see Viewing a cluster or node 
report.
Understanding Compliance reports
Compliance reports are available for the AppAssure Core and AppAssure Agent. They provide you with a way to 
view the status of jobs performed by a selected core or agent. Failed jobs appear in red text. Information in the 
Core Compliance Report that is not associated with an agent appears blank.
Details about the jobs are presented in a column view that includes the following categories:
•Core
•Protected Agent
•Ty p e
•Summary
•Status
•Error
•Start Time
•End Time
•Time
•To t a l  W o r k
For information about how to generate a report, see Generating a report for a core or agent. Table 115. Reports toolbar icons
Icon Description
Print the report
Print the current page
Export a report and save it to the disk 
						

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Understanding Failure reports
Failure reports are subsets of the compliance reports and are available for AppAssure Cores and AppAssure 
Agents. Failure reports include only the failed jobs listed in Compliance Reports and compile them into a single 
report that can be printed and exported.
Details about the errors are presented in a column view with the following categories:
•Core
•Agent
•Ty p e
•Summary
•Error
•Start Time
•End Time
•Elapsed Time
•To t a l  W o r k
For information about how to generate a report, see Generating a report for a core or agent.
Understanding the Summary report
The Summary report includes information about the repositories on the selected AppAssure Core and about the 
agents protected by that core. The information appears as two summaries within one report. For information on 
how to generate a summary report, see Generating a report for a core or agent.
Repositories summary
The Repositories portion of the Summary Report includes data for the repositories located on the selected 
AppAssure Core. Details about the repositories are presented in a column view with the following categories:
•Name
•Data Path
•Metadata Path
•Allocated Space
•Used Space
•Free Space
•Compression/Dedupe Ratio
NOTE: Allocated, used, and free space are represented in units of measurement. The 
measurements are GB, TB, or Seconds. 
						

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Agents summary
The Agents portion of the Summary Report includes data for all machines protected by the selected AppAssure 
Core.
Details about each protected machine is presented in a column view with the following categories:
•Name
•Pr ote ct ed  Vol um es
•Total protected space
•Current protected space
•Change rate per day (Average | Median)
•Jobs Statistic (Passed | Failed | Canceled)
Generating a report for a core or agent
Complete the steps in the following procedure to generate a report for an AppAssure Core or for a protected 
machine.
To generate a report for a core or protected machine
1 Navigate to the AppAssure Core Console and select the Core or the protected machine for which you 
want to run the report.
2 Click the Tools tab.
3 From the Tools tab, expand Reports in the left navigation area.
4 In the left navigation area, select the report you want to run. The reports available depend on the 
selection you made in Step 1 and are described in the following table.
5 In the Start Time drop-down calendar, select a start date, and then enter a start time for the report.
6 In the End Time drop-down calendar, select an end date, and then enter an end time for the report.
7 For a Summary Report, select the All Time check box if you want the Start Time and the End Time to 
span the lifetime of the Core.
8 For a Compliance Report or a Failure Report, use the Target Cores drop-down list to select the Core for 
which you want to view data.
9Click Generate Report.
After the report generates, you can use the toolbar to print or export the report. For more information 
about the toolbar, see Using the reports toolbar. Table 116. Available reports
Machine Available Reports
Core Compliance Report
Summary Report
Failure Report
Agent Compliance Report
Failure Report
NOTE: No data is available before the time the Core or the AppAssure Agent software on the 
protected machine was deployed. 
						

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Understanding Central Management Console 
core reports
AppAssure lets you generate and view compliance, error, and summary information for multiple AppAssure 
Cores. Details about the Cores are presented in column views with the same categories described in the sections 
Understanding Compliance reports, Understanding Failure reports, and Understanding the Summary report.
For information on how to generate a report for multiple cores, see Generating a report from the Central 
Management Console.
Generating a report from the Central 
Management Console
Complete the following procedure to generate a report for multiple AppAssure Cores from the Central 
Management Console.
To generate a report from the Central Management Console
1 From the Central Management Console Welcome screen, click the drop-down menu in the upper-right 
corner.
2 From the drop-down menu, click Reports and then select one of the following options:
•Compliance Report
•Summary Report
•Failure Report
3 From the left navigation area, select the AppAssure Core or Cores for which you want to run the report.
4 In the Start Time drop-down calendar, select a start date, and then enter a start time for the report.
5 In the End Time drop-down calendar, select an end date, and then enter an end time for the report.
6Click Generate Report.
After the report generates, you can use the toolbar to print or export the report. For more information 
about the toolbar, see Using the reports toolbar.
NOTE: No data is available before the time the Cores were deployed. 
						

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Restoring data
This chapter describes how to restore backed up data. It includes the following sections:
•Restoring data from recovery points
•Restoring volumes from a recovery point
•Restoring a directory or file using Windows Explorer
•Restoring a directory or file and preserving permissions using Windows Explorer
The AppAssure Core can instantly restore data or recover machines to physical or virtual machines from the 
recovery points. The recovery points contain agent volume snapshots captured at the block level. These 
snapshots are application aware, meaning that all open transactions and rolling transaction logs are completed 
and caches are flushed to disk before creating the snapshot. Using application-aware snapshots in tandem with 
Ve r i f i e d  Re c o v e r y enables the Core to perform several types of recoveries, including:
•Recovery of files and folders
•Recovery of data volumes, using Live Recovery
•Recovery of data volumes for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, using Live Recovery
•Bare metal restore, using Universal Recovery
•Bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware, using Universal Recovery
•Ad-hoc and continual export to virtual machines
Restoring data from recovery points
AppAssure protects your data on Windows and Linux machines. Backups of protected agent machines are saved 
to the AppAssure Core as recovery points, Using these recovery points, you can restore your data using one of 
three methods.
From the AppAssure Core Console, you can restore entire volumes from a recovery point of a non-system 
volume, replacing the volumes on the destination machine. You can do this for Windows or Linux machines. For 
more information, see Restoring volumes from a recovery point.
You can also restore entire volumes on Linux machines from recovery points using the command line from the 
Linux agent. For more information on using the command line aamount utility, see Restoring volumes for a Linux 
machine using the command line.
You cannot restore a volume that contains the operating system directly from a recovery point, because the 
machine to which you are restoring is using the operating system and drivers that are included in the restore 
process. If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume (for example, the C drive of the agent 
machine), you must perform a Bare Metal Restore (BMR). This involves creating a bootable image from the 
recovery point, which includes operating system and configuration files as well as data, and starting the target 
machine from that bootable image to complete the restore. The boot image differs if the machine you want to 
restore uses a Windows operating system or a Linux operating system.
If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume on a Windows machine, see Performing a bare 
metal restore for Windows machines.
If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume on a Linux machine, see Pe rf orm in g a b ar e 
metal restore for Windows machines. 
						

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Version 5.4.3 Revision B225 Finally, in contrast to restoring entire volumes, you can mount a recovery point from a Windows machine, and 
browse through individual folders and files to recover only a specific set of files. For more information, see 
Restoring a directory or file using Windows Explorer. If you need to perform this while preserving original file 
permissions (for example, when restoring a user’s folder on a file server), see Restoring a directory or file and 
preserving permissions using Windows Explorer.
The topics in this section describe information about restoring data on physical machines. For more information 
on exporting protected data from Windows Machines to virtual machines, see Exporting protected data from 
Windows machines to virtual machines.
Restoring volumes from a recovery point
You can restore the volumes on a protected machine from the recovery points stored in the AppAssure Core. In 
AppAssure 5.4 and later, this process uses the Restore Machine Wizard.
You can begin a restore from any location on the AppAssure Core Console by clicking the Restore icon in the 
AppAssure button bar. When you start a restore in this manner, you must specify which of the machines 
protected on the Core you want to restore, and then drill down to the volume you want to restore.
Or, you can drill down in the Core Console UI to a specific machine, expand the recovery points for volumes on 
that machine, and from the appropriate recovery point, select Restore. If you begin a restore in this manner, 
then follow this procedure starting with Step 5.
If you want to restore a recovery point on a Linux machine, you should first dismount the disk on which you will 
be restoring data.
If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume, or restore from a recovery point using a boot 
CD, you must perform a Bare Metal Restore (BMR). For information about BMR, see Understanding bare metal 
restore for Windows machines, and for prerequisite information for Windows or Linux operating systems, see 
Prerequisites for performing a bare metal restore for a Windows machine and Prerequisites for performing a 
bare metal restore for a Linux machine, respectively. You can access BMR functions from the Core Console as 
described in the roadmap for each operating system. You can also perform a BMR from the Restore Machines 
Wizard. This procedure will direct you at the appropriate point in the wizard to the procedure Managing a 
Windows boot image and launching a BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard.
Follow the procedure below to restore volumes from a recovery point.
To restore volumes from a recovery point
1 To restore a volume on a protected machine from the Restore icon, navigate to the Core Console and 
click Restore from the AppAssure button bar.
The Restore Machine Wizard appears.
NOTE: When recovering data on Windows machines, if the volume that you are restoring has Windows 
data deduplication enabled, you will need to make sure that deduplication is also enabled on the Core 
server.
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AppAssure supports Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 for 
normal transfers (both base and incremental) as well as with restoring data, bare metal restore, and 
virtual exports.

For more information on the types of volumes supported and not supported for backup and recovery, see 
Dynamic and basic volumes support limitations.
NOTE: In previous releases, this process was referred to as performing a rollback.

AppAssure supports the protection and recovery of machines configured with EISA partitions. Support is 
also extended to Window 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 machines 
that use Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE). 
						

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Version 5.4.3 Revision B226 2 From the Protected Machines page, select the protected machine for which you want to restore data, 
and then click Next.
The Recovery Points page appears.
3 From the list of recovery points, search for the snapshot you want to restore to the agent machine.
•If necessary, use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the page to display additional recovery 
points.
•Optionally, If you want to limit the amount of recovery points showing in the Recovery Points page 
of the wizard, you can filter by volumes (if defined) or by creation date of the recovery point.
4 Click any recovery point to select it, and then click Next.
The Destination page appears.
5 On the Destination page, choose the machine to which you want to restore data as follows:
•If you want to restore data from the selected recovery point to the same agent machine (for 
example, Machine1), and if the volumes you want to restore do not include the system volume, 
then select Recover to a protected machine (only non-system volumes), verify that the 
destination machine (Machine1) is selected, and then click Next.
The Volume Mapping page appears. Proceed to Step 9.
•If you want to restore data from the selected recovery point to a different protected machine 
(for example, to replace the contents of Machine2 with data from Machine1), then select 
Recover to a protected machine (only non-system volumes), select the destination machine 
(for example, Machine2) from the list, and then click Next.
The Volume Mapping page appears. Proceed to Step 9.
•If you want to restore from the selected recovery point to the same machine or a different 
machine using a boot CD, this is considered a bare metal restore (BMR). For information about 
BMR, see Understanding bare metal restore for Windows machines.
If the volumes you want to restore do not include the system volume, then select Recover to any 
target machine using a boot CD. This option will prompt you to create a boot CD.
•To continue and create the boot CD with information from the selected recovery point 
using the Restore Machine Wizard, click Next and proceed to Managing a Windows boot 
image and launching a BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard.
•If you have already created the boot CD and the target machine has been started using the 
boot CD, then proceed to Step 8 of the topic Managing a Windows boot image and 
launching a BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard.
•If you want to restore from a recovery point to a system volume (for example, the C drive of the 
agent machine named Machine1), this is also considered a BMR. Select Recover to any target 
machine using a boot CD. This option will prompt you to create a boot CD.
•To continue and create the boot CD with information from the selected recovery point 
using the Restore Machine Wizard, click Next and proceed to Managing a Windows boot 
image and launching a BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard.
•If you have already created the boot CD, then proceed to 
Step 6.
6 Start the machine you want to restore to using the boot CD. For more information, for BMR on a Windows 
machine, see Loading the boot CD and starting the target machine and for BMR on a Linux machine, see 
Loading the Live DVD and starting the target machine.
NOTE: The protected machine must have the Agent software installed and must have recovery 
points from which you will perform the restore operation.
NOTE: Performing a BMR has specific requirements, based on the operating system of the 
agent machine you want to restore. To understand these prerequisites, see Prerequisites for 
performing a bare metal restore for a Windows machine and Prerequisites for performing a 
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Version 5.4.3 Revision B227 7 Back on the Core server, in the Destination page of the Restore Machine Wizard, select I already have a 
boot CD running on the target machine and enter the information about the machine to which you want 
to connect as described in the following table.
8Click Next.
If the connection information you entered matches the URC, and if the Core and the target server can 
identify each other properly on the network, then the volumes for the selected recovery point are 
loaded, and the Disk Mapping page appears. 
To complete your BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard, proceed to Step 8 of the topic Managing a 
Windows boot image and launching a BMR from the Restore Machine Wizard.
9 On the Volume Mapping page, for each volume in the recovery point that you want to restore, select the 
appropriate destination volume. If you do not want to restore a volume, in the Destination Volumes 
column, select Do not restore.
10 Select Show advanced options and then do the following:
•For restoring to Windows machines, if you want to use Live Recovery, select Live Recovery.
Using the Live Recovery instant recovery technology in AppAssure, you can instantly recover or 
restore data to your physical machines or to virtual machines from stored recovery points of 
Windows machines, which includes Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces. Live Recovery is not 
available for Linux machines.
•If you want to force dismount, select Fo rce D is m ou nt.
If you do not force a dismount before restoring data, the restore may fail with a volume in use 
error.
11 If the volumes you want to restore contain SQL or Microsoft Exchange databases, then on the Dismount 
Databases page, you are prompted to dismount them. Optionally, if you want to remount these 
databases after the restore is complete, select Automatically remount all databases after the recovery 
point is restored. Then click Finish.
12 Click OK to confirm the status message that the restore process has started.
13 Optionally, to monitor the progress of your restore action, on the Core Console, click Events. For more 
information, see Viewing tasks, alerts, and events. Table 117. Machine information
Te x t  B o x D e s c r i p t i o n
IP Address The IP address of the machine to which you want to restore. This is identical 
to the IP address displayed in the URC.
Authentication Key The specific password to connect to the selected server. This is identical to 
the Authentication Key displayed in the URC.
NOTE: While AppAssure supports FAT32 and ReFS partitions, at present, only full restore and BMR 
are supported as a driver limitation exists with ReFS, so restore is implemented in user mode, VM 
export, and so on. If a Core is protecting at least one agent volume that contains the ReFS file 
system, it should be installed on Windows 8/2012 which provides native support of ReFS, otherwise 
functionality will be limited and operations that involve such things as mounting a volume image 
will not work. The AppAssure Core Console will present applicable error messages in these 
occurrences.
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Bare metal restore of Storage Spaces disks configuration (a feature of Windows 8.1) is also not 
supported in this release. For details, see the Dell AppAssure Installation and Upgrade Guide. 
						

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Restoring a directory or file using Windows 
Explorer
You can use Windows Explorer to copy and paste directories and files from a mounted recovery point to any 
Windows machine. This can be helpful when you want to distribute only a portion of a recovery point to your 
users.
When you copy directories and files, the access permissions of the user who is performing the copy operation 
are used and applied to the pasted directories and files. If you want to restore directories and files to your users 
while preserving original file permissions (for example, when restoring a user’s folder on a file server), see 
Restoring a directory or file and preserving permissions using Windows Explorer.
To restore a directory or file using Windows Explorer
1 Mount the recovery point that contains the data you want to restore. For details, see Mounting a 
recovery point.
2 In Windows Explorer, navigate to the mounted recovery point and select the directories and files that 
you want to restore. Right-click and select Copy.
3 In Windows Explorer, navigate to the machine location to where you want to restore the data. Right-click 
and select Paste.
Restoring a directory or file and preserving 
permissions using Windows Explorer
You can use Windows Explorer to copy and paste directories and files from a mounted recovery point to any 
Windows machine while preserving file access permissions.
For example, if you need to restore a folder accessed only by specific users on a file server, you can use the 
Copy and Paste with Permissions commands to ensure that the restored files retain the permissions that 
restrict access. In this way, you can avoid having to manually apply permissions to the restored directories and 
files.
To restore a directory or file and preserve permissions using Windows Explorer
1 Mount the recovery point that contains the data you want to restore. For details, see Mounting a 
recovery point.
2 In Windows Explorer, navigate to the mounted recovery point and select the directories and files that 
you want to restore. Right-click and select Copy.
3 In Windows Explorer, navigate to the machine location to where you want to restore the data. Right-click 
and select Paste wit h Permissions.
NOTE: The Paste with Permissions command is installed with AppAssure Core and Agent software. It is not 
available in the Local Mount Utility.
NOTE: In this step, if the Paste wit h Permissions command is disabled on the right-click menu, 
then Windows Explorer is not aware of the files that you want to copy. Repeat Step 2 to enable the 
Paste  with Permissions command on the right-click menu.