Restoring Areca Backups

The first step to restoring an Areca backup image is to map the network drives as they were on the computer you made the backup from (if you were using network drives to store the backup).  If you can't remember how the network drives were initially configured or mapped, proceed to the next step, and Areca will eventually tell you which drive is missing.  Once the drives have been remapped as before, and if the backup file is no longer stored on that mapped drive, copy your Areca backup folder (for example, in my case, the folder named 1878606550) to the backup drive location.   

In order to restore an Areca backup archive onto another computer, you need to copy the bcfg file located in the areca_config_backup folder to the Areca workspace directory on the computer you're attempting to restore the files on.  Once you've done that, you can restart Areca, and you'll be prompted to provide the encryption key.  Enter it here.

Assuming the drives exist as they did on the previous computer and the backup folder exists where the backups were being stored, you should be able to view the files within the Archives tab.  Right click on the backup and choose "Recover".  Follow this wizard, and the files will be unencrypted and extracted.   

RAID Synchronization CRON Job Affecting Performance

For some FakeRaid configurations, CentOS 7 and newer variants may run a RAID synchronization job configured in the /etc/cron.d directory in a file named raid-check.

This job is responsible for making sure the RAID array is in sync across all drives.  It runs by default every week on Sunday at 1 AM.

# Run system wide raid-check once a week on Sunday at 1am by default

However, this was not a convenient time for my users, as they were gaming at this time, so rather than affect server performance, I changed the cronjob to:

0 5 1 * * root /usr/bin/test $(/usr/bin/date +\%u) -ne 6 && /usr/sbin/raid-check

Thus, the sync job now runs once a month on the 1st at 5 AM.  And, it will not run if the day of the week is a Saturday.  This applies to several of my C1100 servers.