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Robocopy instead replication?

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Dear Acronis-Team,

what do you think about using robocopy instead of the build in replication by Acronis? Replication works fine but the second backup validation check takes time. We feel a little better with the validation checked on. Do you see any problems doing the backup mirror with robocopy /mir from an already validated backup target?

Best regards,

David

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Hi David,

In general it is possible to use robocopy for replicating the backup files, however I'm unsure (quick search didn't gave me definite answer to this question) whether robocopy is capable for incremental updating of replicated files, e.g. whether it covers the following scenario:

- You have a huge >100GB single file in primary location

- This file is copied to secondary location

- The file is updated with new data in the primary location

- You run robocopy to try synching the contents of the file

What will happen? Only the changes to the file will be copied OR the entire file will be overwritten (traffic >100GB)?

If the 1st answer is correct (only changes transferred), then robocopy should properly cover the scenario. If the 2nd answer is the right one, then you should switch from default backup format in Acronis Backup (Backup Options->Backup format, while creating the backup plan) to version 11 one, which will produce separate files for each backup, instead of updating single-file backup, so that robocopy could transfer only changes.

In either case you should try replicating the backup files via robocopy and then trying to recover some data from the copied backups in order to confirm that backups remained valid.

Thank you.

Hi Vasily,

thank you very much for your given example. You are totaly right, it seems to make sence only with backup format 11, so with version 12 it would copy the entire hive each time. Good thoughts!

I decided to leave everything as it is and let Acronis do this job. I backup a large application server with multiple Oracle databases and at the end, a normal compressed backup is up to ~400GB. With validation on first and second backuptarget it takes up to 8 hours to finish this backup job. Within the week i backup only the file output from Oracle rman to the both targets and sundays the entire machine. The 400GB job runs without validation within 2-3 hours.

And here comes the problem - if there is anything going on and the job runs over the time where the agent should start another job, the new job will crash because the job before is not finished afaik the agent can handle one task at the same time.

Is validation the final clue of whisdom or better: how much does the validation increase the rate of being successful in numbers? is there anything you could give us a look behind this feature?

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David,

Thank you for the additional details. The validation in its essense is the process of comparing the checksums calculated for the data chunks within the backup with the checksums recorded in the same archive during the intial backup. It validates an entire recovery point in the archive, which effectively means that backup will be restored successfully entirely - this is also the reason for why validation after incremental backups takes approximately the same time as validation of initial full backup (since it has to validate incremental chunks + chunks from full backup). What validation guarantees is that the data saved in the backup can be "as is" restored from the backup in its original state, so if there were some corrupted files on the backed up source which were included in the backup then they obviously will remain corrupt after recovery.

Thank you.