A media agent is configured to perform substantially autonomously to initiate, continue, and manage information management operations such as a backup job of a certain client's primary data, manage the operations, and generate and store resultant system-level metadata from the operations, etc. The media agent is configured to do this even when out of communication with the storage manager that manages the information management system. When communications are restored, the media agent reports the relevant metadata to the storage manager such that the storage manager may seamlessly integrate the information into its management information infrastructure.