54 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010If you try to log off, shut down or hibernate the machine using the Start Menu commands, the end of thecurrent session will be automatically postponed until the recovery is completed. Should you decide to switchoff the machine with the Power button though, all the changes made to the system since the last boot upwould be lost, the system will not be recovered, not even partially, and the only possible solution in thiscase will be to start the recovery process anew, from a bootable media.6. The background recovery continues until all the selected volumes are recovered, the log entry ismade and the Acronis Active Restore icon disappears from the system tray.2.13 Understanding centralized managementThis section contains an overview of centralized data protection with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10.Please be sure you have an understanding of how data is protected on a single machine (p. 26)before reading this section.2.13.1 Basic conceptsApplying backup policies and tracking their executionTo protect data on a single machine, you install on the machine an agent (p. 360) or multiple agentsfor various data types you want to protect. You connect the console to the machine and create abackup plan (p. 362) or multiple backup plans.What if you have to manage hundreds of machines? It takes time to create a backup plan on eachmachine, while the plans may be quite similar – you need to back up, say, the system drive and theusers' documents. Tracking the plans' execution on each machine separately is also time-consuming.To be able to propagate the management operations to multiple machines, you install AcronisBackup & Recovery 10 Management Server (p. 370) and register (p. 371) the machines on the server.After that you can create groups of machines and thus manage multiple machines as a whole. Youcan protect all of them or your selection by setting up a common backup plan, which is called abackup policy (p. 362).Once you apply the policy to a group of machines, the management server deploys the policy to eachof the machines. On each machine the agents find the items to back up and create correspondingcentralized backup plans (p. 364). You will be able to monitor the policies’ statuses on a single screenand navigate, if required, to each machine, plan or task to see their status and log entries. Themanagement server also enables you to monitor and manage the agent's locally originated activities.Since you connect the console to the management server rather than to each machine and performall management operations through the central management unit, this way of management is calledcentralized management (p. 364).Centralized management does not rule out the direct management (p. 365) of each machine. You canconnect the console to each machine and perform any direct management operation. However,centralized backup plans can be managed through the management server only, since a well-thoughtout policy functions automatically and rarely requires human intervention.Using the management server, you can create one or more centralized archive storages (centralizedvaults (p. 364)), which will be shared by the registered machines. A centralized vault can be used byany backup policy as well as by any backup plan created on the registered machines using directmanagement.
