You are here: Introduction > About this guide

About this Guide

This guide is a comprehensive reference that describes how to administer Unitrends Recovery-Series and Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) appliances. The purpose of this guide is to facilitate smooth and successful configuration and administration of your Unitrends appliance. It is intended for administrators and technical personnel who are responsible for installing, configuring, and administering the Unitrends appliance and assumes intermediate to advanced computer skills.

All procedures are performed from the appliance User Interface (UI), unless otherwise specified. Access the UI using a Firefox or Chrome Internet browser. Internet Explorer is not supported.

Using this guide

This guide provides conceptual, procedural, and referential information for the administration of your Unitrends appliance. Unitrends recommends familiarizing yourself with this information prior to configuring and operating your appliance.

Overviews of features and instructions include considerations, requirements, and prerequisite information to assist in planning an effective protection strategy.
Procedural information provides step-by-step instructions on performing backup and recovery operations. Instructions follow best practices for successful configuration and administration of your Unitrends data protection and recovery solution.
See Backup Administration and Procedures for instructions on performing, monitoring, and managing backup and backup copy jobs.
For recovering backups, see the appropriate procedure for the backup type:
Host-level — See Recovering Host-level Backups.
Asset-level — See Recovering Asset-level Backups.
Applications — See Recovering Application Backups .
NAS — See Recovering NAS Backups.
Cross-references and links throughout this guide provide access to additional sources of information and assistance.

Typographical conventions

This guide uses some special typographical effects to convey certain information. Review the following for additional information:

Typographical convention Description
Bold

Indicates one of the following:

Items you select in the UI, such as menu commands.
Text you enter in fields in the UI.
Courier

Indicates one of the following:

Text you enter via the command line, outside of the UI.
Output displayed by a system console, outside of the UI.
Greater-than symbol (>) Separates sequential commands.
Blue text

Indicates one of the following:

Link to the Unitrends website
Link to an external website
Cross reference to another section in this guide
Link to a Unitrends Knowledge Base article

Glossary of terms and acronyms

The following table describes the terms and acronyms commonly used in this document.

Term Definition

Agent

Unitrends software installed on machines you wish to protect with asset-level backups.

Asset

Physical and virtual machines, databases, and applications protected by the Unitrends appliance.

Note:  The appliance automatically detects the virtual machines and applications on the virtual hosts and physical assets you add to the appliance.

Backup group

The appliance organizes backups into groups to manage dependencies. A backup group contains a full backup and any subsequent incrementals and differentials. A backup group always starts with a full backup.

Backup mode

A backup's mode determines what data to include in the backup. Example modes: full, incremental, and differential.

Backup strategy

Combination of backups and backup copies used to protect assets.

Dashboard

A summary of the appliance’s status with topic-specific tiles that capture at-a-glance data for various aspects of the appliance.

Deduplication

Specialized data compression technique that eliminates duplicate data blocks.

Global options toolbar

Toolbar across the top of the user interface that includes several menus to quickly edit global options, perform administrative tasks, and access additional resources.

Instant Recovery (IR)

Process that recovers a failed or corrupted virtual machine or Windows physical machine in minutes.

Job

Procedures performed to protect assets. Multiple job types exist, all of which can be monitored from the Active Jobs tile while in progress.

Protected asset

Any physical machine, virtual machine, or application protected with Unitrends backups.

Recovery object

Disk image created on the backup appliance during instant recovery or during file-level recovery from a host-level backup.

Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)

Desired number of recovery points.

Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)

Desired speed of recovery.

Replica

Virtualized copy of an asset that can immediately assume the role of that asset in case of failure. Created by performing instant recovery.

Resources

Amount of space, bandwith, disk space, memory, etc. consumed by the job or object.

System load

Amount of resources being used by the system at any given time.

Tile

Topic-based sections of the dashboard.

Type

Description of both a function (backup, recover) and the storage media, such as attached virtual disk. For example, an attached disk configured as backup storage.

Virtual Failover Client (VFC)

Virtual replica created during instant recovery of a failed Windows asset that can immediately assume the role of the original client in the event of a disaster.

Virtual Host Host on which virtual machine assets reside.

Windows Instant Recovery (WIR)

Temporary solution for rapid recovery of a failed Windows asset. Creates a virtual replica of the asset that can immediately assume the role of the original in the event of a disaster.