A little remote backup/air-gapped advice

[robg]

Hello, they want to do a monthly backup to store off-line, and I'm looking for a good strategy. I think it will be a small 2-bay NAS device that they turn on a set date every month, and then turn off after the success email is sent. I know some of you will say this is not ideal, but the facilities guy there is very good about following procedures, he's just going to press the button on the date he is told. What do you think is an ideal way to store this? Make it an iSCSI VMFS target for replication, or for backup copies? I want this to be as automated as possible, I don't want to manually have to refresh a repository or anything like that. thanks!

[david.domask]

Will let others chime in on more specifics, but personally I would find trying to manage an airgapped VMFS datastore for replicas annoying, and I would elect for a Backup Copy repository.

Similarly, you will probably want to add a small scheduled script task on the backup server itself to rescan the repository when it comes online; you can use Rescan-VBREntity for that, and just pass the repository itself to be rescanned.