Dell EMC Avamar for Windows Servers 19.7 User Guide

Considerations for critical disks and dynamic disks

A critical disk or volume can contain operating system files and application services.

If a disk contains a mount point for a critical disk, then the disk with the mount point is also a critical disk. For example, if F:\ is a critical disk and is mounted on P:\MountPoint_For_F, then P:\ becomes a critical disk. Mount critical disks to C:\, or another disk that is critical.

If any volume of a dynamic disk pack is critical, then all volumes in the dynamic disk pack become critical. You can exclude noncritical dynamic disks from the system state backups to avoid unnecessarily large the system state backups.

On Windows Server 2019, 2016, 2012, and Windows 8, an application or service may cause a noncritical disk to become critical if you install the application or service on the disk. You can exclude noncritical disks from the backup if the disks become critical from these applications or services.

The BMR process restores all critical disks except for critical disks on shared storage in a cluster. Each critical disk is formatted during BMR, which destroys any existing data. Store application data, such as Exchange or SQL databases, on noncritical disks whenever possible.

Generally, when you restore to the original system, the BMR process does not format noncritical disks. However, when you restore to a different system, BMR sometimes fails if the recovery process cannot format the noncritical disks.