Backup or replication - which one ?

[lcaller]

All,

i've got a customer who we use Veeam at present to backup the VM's as normal. Now the customer wants to use this as "DR" and i just want to be clear about my options as they are expecting this to replace the need for backup.

1) 4 machines they want to replicate once a day and for that would i be better off using backup rather than replicate?
2) 2 of the critical machines they want to replicate as often as possible and it's how i then deal with the backing up of these machines i'm a little unclear of. The assumption is that if replicate the machine 4 times a day, then if we hold 28 restore points on disk they can use these as points to pull files from for restores. Like a 7 day backup retention period but something tells me this thinking is fundamentally flawed ?

If they don't need to constantly replicate and are happy being a few hours out should i then just back the machine up 4 times a day and give myself proper backups rather than hoping to pull files from a replica.

Many thanks

Lee

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Lee,

We've got a good summary on all job types in our sticky F.A.Q. It should help you make the right choice.

My general recommendation would be to use replicas for VMs with low RTO requirements. As to file level recovery, then it is possible to do from both replicas and backups.

Hope this helps.