Alike v4.0 Video Tutorial: Configuring Offsite Vaulting for Amazon S3

Welcome back to the Alike v4.0 video tutorial series! This week, we’ll introduce you to Offsite Vaulting and show you how to configure offsite vaulting for Amazon S3.*

Click here to learn how to set up an Amazon S3 bucket before changing the offsite vaulting settings in the Alike management console.

Introduction to Offsite Vaulting

With Alike DR, you get the option to use our Offsite Vaulting feature. Offsite vaulting is an efficient way to send backup data to a secondary storage location, called the Offsite Data Store (ODS). The ODS is a self-contained repository of selected VM versions that shares the same global data deduplication properties of your Alike Data Store. You can use any CIFS share as your ODS location.

Vault jobs are scheduled as extensions to backup jobs, with a new “vault” launching as each VM backup is completed. These vaults send only compressed delta data to the ODS, and will follow bandwidth constraints that you provide. Vaulted backups have the same restore options as your local backups (ie. file level, restore directly to VM, export to OVF, etc), and are launched directly from your onsite Alike install.

In case of a disaster, you can also use a special type of install of Alike called the Offsite Console to connect to your existing ODS and begin restoring rapidly. The Offsite Console is a read-only view of your vaulted VMs that makes restoring VMs or files easy. The Offsite Console is an optional component for convenience; you can also connect any Alike DR installation to an existing ODS location to restore from it, including your Amazon S3 bucket.

Alike v4.0 Video Tutorial on Configuring Amazon S3 for Your ODS

Now that you are familiar with how offsite vaulting works, and the advantages of this feature, watch this short video on how to store a deduplicated, encrypted copy of your data remotely, specifically how to:

  • Create an Amazon S3 bucket for offsite storage
  • Enable offsite vaulting for Amazon S3
  • Vault backups from a specific job to your offsite vault

*Please note: By sending your backups to Amazon’s S3, you will incur storage and usage costs directly from Amazon. Although Alike compresses and deduplicates your data before sending it to S3, undoubtedly large volumes of data will be involved. Please refer to Amazon’s S3 pricing for your region.

Easy To Install. Easy To Use. Free To Try.