DL4300 Appliance
Determining your seeding needs and strategy
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For example, when you first establish replication, your options for restoring data from the replicated recovery
points are limited. Until all backup data from the source Core is transmitted to the target Core, creating full
recovery point chains from the orphans, you can only perform file-level restore.
Parent topic
When replication begins
By default, replication transfer jobs are automatically queued by the Core immediately after each regularly
scheduled backup transfer completes. Thus, unless the replication schedule for a protected machine is
customized, its replication schedule is based on its standard backup snapshot schedule.
When you first set up replication, if one or more recovery points exist on the source Core, the replication process
begins immediately, unless:
•
You select the option to initially pause replication, or
•
You select the option to use a seed drive to perform the initial transfer.
If you pause replication initially, replication begins when you explicitly resume replication.
If you set up replication and specify the use of a seed drive, replication to the target Core begins with the next
regularly scheduled backup snapshot.
NOTE:
You can also force a backup of the protected machine after establishing replication. This causes
replication to begin immediately after the protected machine snapshot completes.
If you specify a seed drive when you set up replication, only future backup transfers are replicated. If you want
existing recovery points from the original protected machine to exist on the target Core, you must seed data from
the protected machine. To seed data, create a seed drive from the source Core, and then consume the seed drive
on the target Core.
You can also customize the replication schedule for a protected machine. For example, if you use the default
protection schedule of one backup per hour, you can specify that the source Core replicate to the target Core at a
different schedule (for example, once daily at 2AM).
Parent topic
Determining your seeding needs and strategy
The following topics discuss restoring from replicated data and whether you need to seed recovery point data
from the source Core.
When seeding data is required
When you first establish replication, unless you specify the use a seed drive, the source Core begins transmitting
all of the recovery points for the selected machines to the target Core. Transmitting your data over the network
can take a good deal of time. Factors involved include the speed of your network, the robustness of your network
architecture, and the amount of data to be transmitted to the target Core. For example, if the backup data on the
source Core measures 10GB and the WAN link transfers 24Mbps, the transfer could take approximately one hour
to complete.
Based on the amount of information you want to copy to the target Core, the seed drive can add up to hundreds
or thousands of gigabytes of data. Many organizations choose not to consume the network bandwidth required,
and instead opt to define and consume a seed drive. For more information, see
Performance considerations for
If you specify the use of a seed drive when defining replication, then only recovery points saved to the source
Core after you establish replication are replicated to the target Core. Backups saved on the source Core before
replication was established will not be present on the target Core until you explicitly seed the data, using the
following process.
