Planning & Setting Up Replication Plan

Replication

Data replication is a process of duplicating data between different storages with a single (or multiple) backup plans. Replication plans in GitProtect are a feature that allows replicating backups from one storage to another, between multiple locations, and even between local storage and public clouds. Including the Replication in your disaster recovery plan will help you to avoid data loss in critical cases (storage corruption, malicious software attack). In order to ensure business continuity, it's recommended to use the Replication feature.

Planning a replication plan

When planning a replication plan, it is important to take a few factors into consideration like storage location, proper schedule, process frequency, and infrastructure resources. To increase the security level it is recommended to keep backup data in at least two different locations, so in case one fails, your backup will still be available on the second one. It's also crucial to execute the replication plan at the right time - make sure that there are no backup tasks running when the replication process should be performed. Keep in mind that the replication process will copy much more data than a single backup plan, so make sure that there are enough resources in your network at the time it's running. How often such a task should be done? It depends on how often you do your backups. If there are a lot of backups going on your infrastructure, then it would be recommended to do the replication minimum of once a week.

Setting up the replication

In order to set up a Replication Plan, log into the GitProtect Management panel and click on the Plans tab. From the extended list select the Replication section.

Click Add plan button in order to open the replication plan form.

After doing so, the system will display Create new replication plan form, where you need to define the Source storage at first.

Click the Source storage section and select one of your available storages (or add a new one for future purposes). Then, click on Target storage and select(or add new storage) that the data will be replicated to.

The storage selected as Target storage cannot be included in any backup plan. The storage will be not visible on the list if there's any backup plan using it.

The next section is a Scheduler, where you can define how often would you like to replicate your data between selected storages.

You can perform the replication Monthly, Daily, and Hourly on selected days, within a specific time. In addition, the system has two additional settings available for replication tasks. You can Set up a replication window (by clicking Edit next to it), which will be the time slot for the task:

or you can force your device to not suspend while performing replication, to make sure that your device - the one responsible for replication task performance will not enter sleep mode. At last, there's also an option to select Replication worker (a device that will perform this task), click the Change button, and choose a device.

The selected device needs to have access to both Source storage and Target storage.

The replication task is now ready. Click the Save button to finish the operation or Save&Run to run the replication task at the same time.