v8 Backup from Replication not the other way around

[VladV]

I have been reading different blog posts on the upcoming v8 features and came across the functionality: Replica from Backup. Why not Backup from Replica?

Our backup and replication scheme is as follows:
During business hours (7 to 17) we do replicas once every 2 hours.
During off hours, at the end of the day, we run a backup job.
At 00:00 we start the backup copy jobs offsite once every 2-3 days or once every 7 days depending on VMs.

So it makes more sense to change the replication schedule to run a final replica job at the end of the day and after that run a Backup job using the replica as source. **Writing this sentence I believe that this is currently possible by, indeed, backing up the replica itself. But, as stated in another thread, not all of the VM settings are replicated. So maybe a special option would be useful in identifying the replica for a specific VM and take the data from it.

Regards

[chrisdearden]

you would also loose CBT.

[Vitaliy S.]

Why not Backup from Replica?

Because you can already do that today

[tsightler]

You can do it today, but with a lot of limitations. CBT doesn't work correctly, and you can't use WAN accelerator for the backup job, and there can be weird conflicts if the replica jobs starts while the replica backup jobs are running since they both create snapshots. In other words, it works better in theory than in practice. There are plenty of good use cases for having a backup job that is updated from a replica.

For example, if you are a ROBO that does replication between two independent hosts at their sites (a common setup), but would then like to get backups to the central site, you have to do local replication, in many cases every few hours, and then you have also do local backups at least once a day with the associated extra space, and then you have to do a backup copy job with WAN accelerator. That extra local backup is really pretty wasteful since they already have a local replica on a different host on different storage. They'd really like to just do the local replication, and have the option to once a day run a backup copy using the local replica as a source and creating a backup at the central site using WAN accelerator.

That being said, I understand that there would be some technical challenges to overcome in such an implementation.

[VladV]

Thanks for the insight guys.

Really forgot about CBT, Chris, not working with other snapshots in place.

And very good points Tom on other useful cases for Backups and Backup Copies from Replicas. Haven't really thought what would happen if the replica gets updated while a backup runs from it as source.

Maybe in the future...