Backup Copy Jobs in a Disaster

[Sam Hates LTO]

Hey,

We have two windows backup repos each one has 2x 700TB volumes, a volume for the VMware backup jobs & then a volume for the backup copy jobs. We cross the copy jobs over between each site so if the VM is backed up onto Servers A's 'Backup Job' repo it will copy the data to Server B's backup Copy Repo.

We are currently changing the way this works and to do so we need to move everything on to just one of the disks so we can format the disk. In order to save transferring 140TB of data to the repo we thought we might be able to point the VMware backup jobs to the copy jobs destination but it looks like this might not be possible?

This then got us thinking about what we would do in a DR scenario where Server A was lost? As far as I can see the whole backup chain would have to be started again which could be years of data causing issues with our retention policy.

If this is the case should we stop using backup copy jobs and look into storage replication instead?

TL:DR is it possible in any way to use the backup copy job chain as the destination for the VMWare backup job?

Cheers
Sam

[foggy]

Hi Samuel, currently you cannot map a primary backup job to backup files produced by a backup copy job. I'm not sure though how this could help in your scenario as on two volumes in one site you have backups for different sets of VMs (from both sites). so mapping wouldn't work anyway.

As for the DR situation, then after restore of the original site, the VMs would anyway be registered under different VM IDs causing full backups for those, so you would have to handle the retention of previous backups manually.