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Remote Replica from Backup

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Disaster recovery plans often require that you back up and replicate the same VM for DR and HA purposes. Normally, this doubles the workload on the virtual infrastructure. You need to create two VM snapshots, independently from one another, and transfer VM data from the production site twice.

You can reduce the workload on the production environment by using the remote replica from backup option. This option can be used for onsite and offsite replication scenarios.

When you perform remote replication from backup, Veeam Backup & Replication does not address hosts and storage in the production environment to read VM data. As a source of data, it uses a backup chain that already exists in the backup repository. As a result, you do not need to create a VM snapshot for replication and transport the same data twice. You retrieve VM data only during the backup job, and the replication job re-uses this data to build VM replica restore points.

Although replica from backup might resemble replica seeding, there is difference between these options:

Replica seeding uses the backup file only during the first run of a replication job. To further build VM replica restore points, the replication job addresses the production environment and reads VM data from the source storage.
Remote replica from backup uses a backup chain in the backup repository as the only source of data. When building a new VM replica restore point, Veeam Backup & Replication always reads data from the latest restore point in the backup chain, either full or incremental. The backup chain in the backup repository may be created with a backup job or a backup copy job.

Limitations for Remote Replica from Backup

Backups that you plan to use as a data source must be created with a backup job configured on the same backup server where you configure the replication job.