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Backups

Unitrends uses backups to create recovery points for your data. Backups are run in different modes and are organized into backup groups. Your backup strategies determine which modes you will use.

Unitrends backups fall into two general categories: local backups and backup copies. Local backups are stored on the appliance. These backups are immediately accessible and enable you to meet low RTOs. Backup copies are stored on an offsite target. These backups are duplicates (hence, "copies") of your local backups, and are used for long-term retention and disaster recovery.

Backup modes

Backup modes determine what data to include in the backup. These modes protect all types of data and apply to asset-level backups, host-level backups, and application backups.

While Unitrends supports a variety of backup modes that give you flexibility in protecting your assets, not all backup modes are supported for all assets. When creating a backup job for a given asset, only supported modes are available for selection.

While creating backup jobs, you can select these backup modes: full, incremental, differential, and selective. In addition to these, the appliance automatically creates synthetic backups as needed. See the following for a description of each:

Backup groups

To protect your data, you will likely use a combination of backup modes. Your Unitrends appliance organizes an asset's backups into groups to manage any interdependencies between backups. The appliance creates a new group when it runs or synthesizes a full backup. Each subsequent differential or incremental forms a link in the chain of backups that constitute the group. Each link in the chain is necessary for data recovery.

The following diagrams illustrate backup groups:

Backup strategies

A data protection strategy consists of utilizing one or more of the backup modes described above. Your strategy is implemented when you schedule jobs to occur at intervals and times you specify. For example, the incremental forever strategy consists of the full and incremental backup modes.

Unitrends recommends using the incremental forever backup strategy when possible, where an initial full backup is followed by incrementals at the frequency and times required to meet your RPOs.

In some cases, you will want to use a different backup strategy (such as weekly fulls with incremental or differentials). You can customize your backups to fit any strategy, using the backup modes as desired. Examples of cases when you would not use the incremental forever strategy include:

Protecting assets for which incrementals are not supported (such as Exchange and SharePoint applications, VMware hardware version 4 VMs, and VMware templates).
Needing to control when full backups are run. (In most cases, this is not an issue since synthetics are run locally on the appliance and do not impact network or asset performance. But you may choose to schedule weekly fulls if appliance resources are taxed at certain times of the day or week.)