A Computer System protection plan will create a complete backup of your system, suitable for recovering complete computer systems (also known as "bare metal" restore). With proper licensing, this plan type is available for local and remote computers.


There are two basic elements for protecting and recovering complete computer systems using this product. The first element is creating and running a Computer System Protection plan. The second element is the System Recovery Environment (SRE). When recovering a complete system, the computer needs to use a bootable device to bootstrap the recovery process. The System Recovery Environment is a custom Microsoft Windows 7 Pre-installation Environment image that can run from a CD/DVD drive, bootable USB drive and, in the case of a virtual machine recovery, mounted as an ISO formatted bootable CD/DVD. Once the computer has been booted with the SRE, the process of recovering the system is only a few steps away.


To start the Add a System Protection Plan wizard click Create Protection Plan from the actions for a Local Plan or a Remote Computer you have added to the system. Then, choose Computer System from the enabled plan types. First, the Add a System Protection Plan wizard displays the disk drives to select for protection by the plan. There are three elements to choose in this view: System Recovery Information, system drives and data drives. When the System Recovery Information is checked all system drives must be checked as well. A system drive will be indicated with an icon of a disk with a Windows Logo overlaid in the upper left of the icon. The data drives are not required to be selected as part of the plan, where it may be preferable to protect data on those drives with a different plan type. For example the data on a data drive might contain database and/or log files for Microsoft Exchange, and in this case an Exchange Data Protection Plan would be a better candidate for protection of the data on this data drive, since only an Exchange Data plan-type truncates Exchange logs.


Next, select a store for the system plan to use for storing the backup data and catalogs. A good practice would be to use a store created specifically for Computer System-type protection plans, as deduplication of data across servers is a big benefit when backing up several Windows computers.


Next, provide a name for the protection plan. Protection plan names must be unique throughout the Archive Manager system. A good practice for a Computer System Protection Plan is to use the computer name as part of the plan name, for example "Denver1 System Plan", where Denver1 is the computer being protected.


Next, select a schedule for running the protection plan. A typical schedule for a system protection plan is to run daily or weekly after business hours. The security options section specifies a user account to use to run the plan. A good practice is to create a single domain administrator account to run all of the protection plans in the environment. See Scheduling Protection Plans for more information.


Finally, click Finish to complete the wizard or Back to review or change any of the plan settings before saving the plan. Note: You will be prompted for a password for the plan "run as" user before the plan is saved to the system. Enter the password and click OK to save the plan.


After the plan is saved a dialog box appears asking if you would like to save the System Recovery Environment to media. This dialog serves as a reminder to save the SRE before it is needed; it is not necessary to save the SRE each time you create a Computer System protection plan. Two separate recovery environments are downloadable from within the product. Some versions of the product also have the SRE environments bundled into the installation program. One System Recover Environment is for BIOS-bootable systems. Most computers today are of this type. The other is for newer UEFI-bootable systems. If you click Yes to save the SRE and the SRE is not already on your system it will be downloaded from the Internet. In addition to saving the SRE to the location you specify, it will be saved in <installation directory>\SRE if not already there. Note: You can download/save the SRE(s) at any time by selecting the Save System Recovery Environment action of the Archive Manager folder in the console tree of the Archive Manager user interface. See Saving the System Recovery Environment to Media for more information.


After the plan is created you can choose one of the following actions to review or modify how and when the plan runs: Plan Settings, Edit Schedule, Run, End, Advanced Settings or Delete Plan. See Run, Edit, Remove a Plan for more information.


To restore a computer system protected by a Computer System protection plan please refer to Saving the System Recovery Environment to Media and Restoring a Computer System.