Veritas™ System Recovery 21 Management Solution Administrator's Guide

About Offsite Copy

Backing up data to a secondary hard disk is a critical first step to protect your information assets. To make certain your data is safe, you can use the Offsite Copy feature when you create a backup policy to copy the latest recovery points. You can copy your recovery points to the following:

Regardless of the copy method you use, Offsite Copy provides a crucial level of redundancy that required if your office becomes inaccessible. Offsite Copy can double your data protection by ensuring that you have a remote copy.

See Creating default recovery point destinations.

The following are three different methods you can use to configure the Offsite Copy feature in Veritas System Recovery 21 Management Solution:

When you enable Offsite Copy through a backup policy, you specify up to two off-site destinations. After the backup policy finishes creating recovery points, Offsite Copy verifies that the off-site destinations are available. Offsite Copy then begins copying the new recovery points to the Offsite Copy destination.

The most recent recovery points are copied first, followed by the next newest recovery points. If you have set up two Offsite Copy destinations, Offsite Copy copies recovery points to the destination that was added first. If an Offsite Copy destination is unavailable, Offsite Copy tries to copy recovery points to the second destination, if it is available. If neither destination is available, then Offsite Copy copies the recovery points the next time an Offsite Copy destination becomes available.

For example, suppose you have configured a backup policy to run at 18:00 and configured an external drive as an Offsite Copy destination. However, when you leave the office at 17:30, you take the drive with you for safekeeping. When the backup policy completes at 18:20, Veritas System Recovery detects that the Offsite Copy destination drive is not available and the copy process is ended. The following morning, you plug the drive back in to the computer. Veritas System Recovery detects the presence of the Offsite Copy destination drive and copies your recovery points.

You can use an external drive as your Offsite Copy destination. This method lets users take a copy of their data with them when they leave the office. By using two external hard disks, the users can be certain that they have a recent copy of their data both on site and off site.

For example, suppose on a Monday morning you define a new backup policy of a system drive on a user's computer. You choose a recovery point set as the backup type. The user has set up an external drive (A), which you use as the first Offsite Copy destination. The user has also added another external drive (B), which you use as the second Offsite Copy destination. You schedule the backup job to run every midnight except on the weekends. You also enable recovery point encryption to protect the user's data from unauthorized access.

Before the user leaves the office on Monday evening, drive A is plugged in and drive B is taken home by the user.

On Tuesday morning, the user finds that Monday's base recovery point is successfully copied to drive A. At the end of the day, the user unplugs drive A and takes it home for safekeeping.

On Wednesday morning, the user brings drive B to the office and plugs it in. Veritas System Recovery detects that drive B is an Offsite Copy destination. The next time the backup policy runs, Veritas System Recovery begins copying Monday night's base recovery point and Tuesday night's incremental recovery point. At the end of the day Wednesday, the user takes drive B home and places it in a safe place with drive A.

The Offsite Copy destination drives are stored in a safe place at the user's home.

The next morning, Thursday, the user takes drive A to the office and plugs it in. Tuesday and Wednesday night's recovery points are copied to drive A.

Each time the user plugs in either drive A or B, the latest recovery points are added to the drive. This method provides multiple points in time for recovering their computer in the event that the original backup destination drives fail or become unrecoverable.

Using external drives as Offsite Copy destinations ensures that users have a copy of their backup data stored at two separate, physical locations.

Veritas System Recovery does not support a USB drive that is used as an Offsite Copy destination on a client computer. If a client computer is brought under management and it already had a local backup job defined that uses a USB drive as an Offsite Copy destination, the local backup job is deleted

If a local drive, with the same drive letter, exists on the computer to which the backup policy is assigned, the backup policy is marked as supported in the Veritas System Recovery 21 Management Solution user interface.

You can specify a local area network share as an Offsite Copy destination. You must be able to access the server that you plan to use. You must either map a local drive to the server or provide a valid UNC path.

For example, suppose that you set up a local external drive as your first Offsite Copy destination. Then you identify a server that is located at a second physical location from your own office. You add the remote server as a second Offsite Copy destination. As backups occur, recovery points are copied first to the external hard drive, and then to the remote server.

If the remote server becomes unavailable for a period of time, Offsite Copy copies all recovery points that were created since the last connection. If an Offsite Copy destination runs out of storage space for recovery points, the Offsite Copy task stops and an error is logged in Veritas System Recovery. You can review the error information in Veritas System Recovery 21 Management Solution by viewing the details of a client computer.

See Viewing Veritas System Recovery details for a client computer.

Using an FTP server as your Offsite Copy destination is similar to using a network path. You must provide a valid FTP path to the FTP server.

You must also provide the correct FTP connection information to Veritas System Recovery 21 Management Solution in order for this method to work correctly. When Offsite Copy is configured correctly, it copies recovery points to the folder that you specified on the FTP server. If the server becomes unavailable for a period of time, Offsite Copy copies all recovery points that were created since the last connection.

If an Offsite Copy destination runs out of storage space for recovery points, the Offsite Copy task stops and an error is logged in Veritas System Recovery. You can review the error information in Veritas System Recovery 21 Management Solution by viewing the details of a client computer.

See Viewing Veritas System Recovery details for a client computer.