Your first backup

Once a device has enrolled and has a backup passphrase, it backs up on its schedule. You do not have to wait for the first scheduled run.

Start a backup

Any of these starts one:

1. In the tenant admin portal, open Agents and choose Back up now on the device. The command reaches the agent over its live connection, so the device must be online.
2. On Windows, open the desktop app and choose Back Up Now. The app shows a progress bar with the time and data remaining, and you can cancel.
3. From a shell on the device: cvn-agent backup --config <path to agent.json> --path <folder>. See Agent command line.

Watch it run

• The tenant admin Dashboard lists active and queued jobs.
• Remote Engine shows a live job console for a device.
• The global admin Overview and Fleet Health show every tenant's devices, failed and stale ones first.

What a backup does

1. The agent fetches its settings from the server: policy, retention, storage target and any backup sources.
2. It dumps any database sources into a temporary folder that is captured and then deleted.
3. It checks the canary file in each backup folder. If a canary has been altered, the backup stops. See Immutability and ransomware.
4. It reads each file, splits it into chunks, compresses and encrypts each new chunk, and uploads it to the storage target.
5. It writes an encrypted manifest that lists every file and its chunks.
6. It reports the new restore point to the server, which updates the tenant's storage usage.

Check the result

1. In the user portal, open Time Machine. The new restore point is on today's date.
2. Open it in File Explorer, enter the backup passphrase and download one file. If the file opens, the backup and your passphrase both work.

Within a week the agent also runs its first automatic recovery check. See Monitoring, alerts and reports.