Capacity Tier
Capacity tier is an additional tier of storage that can be attached to a scale-out backup repository. Data from the scale-out backup repository performance extents can be transported to the capacity tier for long-term storage.
This feature is most useful if:
- You are running out of storage space.
- Your organization policies allow you to store only a certain amount of data on your extents, while the outdated data should be stored elsewhere.
- You seek to store data on several sites to ensure its safety in case of a disaster.
With capacity tier you can:
- Move inactive backup chains to capacity extents, as described in Moving Backups to Capacity Tier and Manually Moving Backups to Capacity Tier.
- Copy new backup files as soon as these files are created, as described in Copying Backups to Capacity Tier.
- Download data that was moved from capacity extents back to the performance extents, as described in Downloading Data from Capacity Tier.
- Restore your data. For more information, see Restore from Capacity Tier. In particular, you can promptly restore data from the capacity tier in case of disaster without creating a scale-out backup repository anew. For more information about this feature, see Importing Object Storage Backups.
The capacity tier consists of multiple capacity extents. The capacity extent can be either a cloud-based object storage repository or on-premises object storage repository, such as:
- S3-compatible object storage repository
- Amazon S3
- AWS Snowball Edge
- Microsoft Azure Blob storage
- Microsoft Azure Data Box
- IBM Cloud Object Storage
- Google Cloud Object Storage
- Wasabi Cloud Object Storage
Before an object storage repository can be configured as the capacity extent, it must be added to Veeam Backup & Replication. For more information, see Adding Object Storage Repositories.
The capacity extents are displayed in the scale-out backup repository wizard, on the Capacity Tier step.
For information on configuring capacity tier and synchronizing capacity tier data, see Add Capacity Tier.
Consider the following limitations for capacity tier:
- You can add only one type of object storage repository as a capacity extent. For example, if your first added Microsoft Azure Blob object storage as a capacity extent, you cannot add Amazon S3 object storage as a second capacity extent.
- You cannot add more than one instance of Azure Databox or Snowball Edge AWS object storage repository as a capacity extent.
- Before you start using the capacity tier, make sure to check the pricing plans of your cloud storage provider to avoid additional costs for offloading and downloading backup data.
- Capacity tier extents must have the same immutability state. If you use immutability, you must enable it for all capacity extents. If you do not plan to use immutability, do not enable it for any capacity extent.
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