Best practise for onsite and offsite backups and replicas

[ChrisCA]

Hi,

I'm just setting up backups and replicas for some of our vms and wanted some clarification.

Production site has 10vms we want to cover, 3 windows and 7 linux over 5 vsphere hosts with a NAS repo.
DR site has 1 vsphere host. Host has a proxy vm and wan accelerator vm.

We have b&r 9.5 at production site and want to have backups to NAS and replicas on 1 host. We then want the backups to copy to a repo on the DR site and replicas to be created daily from these backups.

One issue we have is the wan link to dr is not great so we never want to do full backups over it, and want to seed the initial backup copies. We also only want to do one snapshot per vm per day if possible.

First question is how does the backup policy to our production nas influence the backup copy policy to dr repo? If we're doing daily incremental vm backups and synthetic full every Saturday, how does that interact with the scheduled archived restore points settings for the backup copy job? And does the backup copy job attempt to transfer the full synthetic backup every week, or does the proxy at the dr site handle creating a synthetic backup without using the wan?

Second question is can you set replicas to always seed from backups and backup copies instead of from the vms? And for the replicas at the dr can we set this to be done by the dr proxy once the backup copy job has completed?

Any guidance much appreciated!

[PTide]

Hi,

First question is how does the backup policy to our production nas influence the backup copy policy to dr repo? If we're doing daily incremental vm backups and synthetic full every Saturday, how does that interact with the scheduled archived restore points settings for the backup copy job?

Basically Backup Copy Job transfers all new blocks that appear on the primary backup repository. For example, if you have 4 new incrementals then it will transfer only new blocks from all three incrementals resulting in one new BCJ restore point.

And does the backup copy job attempt to transfer the full synthetic backup every week, or does the proxy at the dr site handle creating a synthetic backup without using the wan?

The latter. Also there is an option to run active full backup copy.

Second question is can you set replicas to always seed from backups and backup copies instead of from the vms?

Yes

And for the replicas at the dr can we set this to be done by the dr proxy once the backup copy job has completed?

Not sure what you mean, please elaborate.

Thank you

[foggy]

And for the replicas at the dr can we set this to be done by the dr proxy once the backup copy job has completed?

Data will be retrieved and written to the datastore by components running at the DR site. Just make sure you're specifying the repository for replica metadata that also resides in the DR.