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Preparing your environment for data protection

SnapManager protects your data by creating backups of your databases (Snapshot copies). You can increase your data protection by using built-in mirroring and archiving technologies (SnapMirror and SnapVault) or by archiving backups to third-party tape devices. You need to prepare your environment if you want to use SnapMirror or SnapVault with SnapManager.

You can use any combination of the following methods to protect your data on secondary storage.

Method Description
Replicating volumes using SnapMirror SnapMirror technology mirrors a Snapshot copy of data on a source volume to one or more destination volumes. After source and destination relationships are established, a SnapMirror baseline transfer initializes the mirror to create a replica of the source on the destination.
Archiving backups using SnapVault SnapVault is a disk-to-disk backup and recovery solution. It leverages the efficiencies of Snapshot copies and protects data at the block level. After the initial full backup is complete, only changed blocks are replicated to the secondary storage system.
Archiving backups to third-party tape devices You can use NDMP, the storage system's dump command, or a Windows backup utility to archive backups to tape.

The following table describes the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

Method Advantages Disadvantages
Replicating volumes using SnapMirror
  • Restoring from a SnapMirror destination is significantly faster than restoring from tape.
  • The destination can be updated more frequently than by using tape, resulting in more current data.
  • Requires another storage system in the remote location.
  • Requires WAN connectivity to the remote location, with enough bandwidth.
  • Mirrors only backup sets that are on the source storage system.
Archiving backups using SnapVault
  • Restoring from a SnapVault archive is faster than archiving from tape.
  • You can create and restore remote backup and archives.
  • The destination can be updated more frequently than by using tape.
  • Backup sets that are no longer available on the primary storage can be retained.
  • Requires another storage system in the remote location.
  • Requires WAN connectivity to the remote location, with sufficient bandwidth.
  • Recovery requires data to be replicated back to the original storage system.
Archiving backups to third-party tape devices
  • Tape backups require fewer resources to maintain.
  • You can place the archives in a more secure place than you can place a storage system.
  • You can recover data from any release of Data ONTAP.
  • Restoring data from tape takes a long time.
  • Finding a particular file or directory on tape is time-consuming.