Archiving Overview

The Unitrends archiving feature enables you to archive local and replicated backups to various archive media for long-term retention and off-site storage of your critical data. Archiving your data is not the same as backing it up. To protect a client, you begin with a full backup and then capture changes from the full in subsequent incremental and/or differential backups. Backups are stored on the Unitrends appliance. By contrast, archiving involves writing these backups to media that can be stored off-site for longer-term retention.

When an archive job is run, set information describing the backup and metadata for the appliance is also written to the media. After running archives, in addition to restoring files, application data, and virtual machines from archives, you can also use archived data to perform bare metal recovery of a failed client and to perform disaster recovery of a backup system. This chapter explains how archiving works, introduces the various supported archive media, and explains key archiving concepts.

This chapter contains the following topics:

If you do not a need an overview and are ready to begin archiving, see one of these chapters on the media type you are using: