Information covered

Purpose

Find out how you can perform a full image backup, and learn to schedule incremental backups and enforce full backups.

Description

IDrive BMR allows you to perform bare-metal backup of your physical machines. The first backup that is initiated on the IDrive BMR device is always a full image backup and consecutive backups are incremental. For incremental backup, the Changed Block Tracking driver is used to identify the changed blocks of data for backup. You can also force a full backup at any time.

First-time backup of a physical machine

Download and install the IDrive BMR backup agent on the physical machine to enable its detection by the device. Upon completing the installation, the device detects the client automatically and initiates a full image backup for the first time as per the schedule specified in your Backup Settings. Subsequent incremental backups too will be performed as per the schedule. If the backup agent takes a longer time to detect the client, click the Having trouble adding a client? link for issue resolution.

Note:

By default, the backup schedule is set from 6:00 PM to 7:00 AM. You can edit this schedule as required.
The first image backup that is initiated on the IDrive BMR device is always a full image backup. If you force a full image backup the second time, a synthetic full backup is performed to save time and storage space.

Read the articles on backup settings and advanced settings to learn how to schedule and manage backup operations.

Manually initiate a backup: Incremental or full image

To manually initiate a backup, click displayed on the LHS of the computer name and select either Backup or Force Full Backup from the drop-down menu to start the backup.

Troubleshooting: the IDrive BMR device report says ‘Server rejected’ for a client computer

Due to security concerns, the backup agent will allow only one IDrive BMR device to identify it. If more than one device tries to detect the agent software, the process will fail and the device will report this message.

If there are multiple IDrive BMR devices on the network and you want to add your computer to a specific device, uninstall the backup agent and reinstall it. During the reinstallation, you will be prompted to specify the IDrive BMR device. Here, select Yes and specify the IDrive BMR device IP.