Off-Host Backup Processing in Acronis Backup 12.5

In your IT environment, you have multiple systems that you need to back up. You have multiple storage locations – as you do not want to put all your eggs in one basket. You also have business requirements that map out priorities of your systems, such as different levels of RPOs and RTOs.

In many cases, you need to have additional protection for your most critical systems, with more aggressive RTOs and RPOs. It means your backups have to run more often, and you need to store copies of your backups in several locations.

The original backup has to be created from the source — but the subsequent operations, like copying the backup to a secondary location, may add unnecessary load to your critical system.

Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced allows you to offload the backup processing operations to a different host. For example, you could have the initial backup scheduled on your original machine, but move the copying (replication) jobs to a different system, which is less loaded, or even dedicated solely to backup processing operations.

Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced can run the following operations on a separate machine with a dedicated schedule:

• Copying (replication) – pick up copy of the backup from one storage location and send it to another
• Cleanup (retention) and moving (staging) – clean up old backups based on the retention policies, and optionally, move a copy of the backup from one storage location to another before deletion.
• Validation – verify the contents of the backup by reading the entire backup and comparing the checksums.
• Sandbox Validation - verify the recoverability of a backup by starting the system from the backup storage, running it in sandbox, checking the logon screens, application startup, and optionally – running the scripts
• VM Conversion – convert backups to virtual machines, including standby machines in VMware and Hyper-V hosts, or as a set of files in other VM formats
• External Operations – run a batch script and archive names as parameters

With these operations, you can design advanced and even exotic backup lifecycle scenarios, like:

• Disk-to-Disk-to-Cloud – back up production systems to a local disk storage, and use a dedicated machine to upload the backups to the Acronis Cloud Storage. This allows you to avoid any internet connectivity bottlenecks, and not to affect production machines
• Disk-to-Dedup-to-Dedup – back up your remote office systems to a deduplicated storage in the remote office, and then upload the copies to the central office’s globally deduplicated storage
• Disk-to-Cloud-to-Disk– back up your C-level executive laptop directly to the cloud, even when the person is travelling, and then download a copy to your on-premises storage