A recovery archive is a full-system archive containing all boot environments from all included instances. Recovery archives consist of a single deployable system regardless of the OS instances which comprise it. While a recovery archive of a global zone may contain non-global zones that are installed within it, the archive itself is treated as a single system. A recovery archive can therefore preserve zone clone relationships, unlike clone archives.
Some inactive boot environments in a recovery archive may not be bootable. The active boot environment is the only fully prepared boot environment. While some inactive BEs may be bootable, they are archived mainly for data recovery. Recovery archives contain a single deployable system. The system may include a global zone, a non-global zone, or a global zone with one or more non-global zones.
A recovery archive is intended to be used for recovery operations, as might be needed in case of a hardware failure. These archives may ideally be deployed as part of a more comprehensive disaster recovery solution. A recovery archive may also be used in a system migration from legacy hardware to new hardware or to virtual systems. Archives are portable across all supported platform models of a particular instruction set architecture (ISA).