This topic provides an overview of the on-premises NAS backup feature of Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR), including the benefits, working principles, procedure, and billing of the feature.

Introduction

On-premises NAS backup is a high-efficiency and low-cost data protection solution provided by HBR for on-premises NAS file systems. HBR supports common file storage protocols such as Network File System (NFS), Common Internet File System (CIFS), and Server Message Block (SMB). HBR provides advanced data protection capabilities such as multi-node concurrent scanning, storage API integration, and deduplication and compression. HBR allows you to efficiently back up a large number of on-premises NAS files to the cloud. To back up data, you only need to perform a few operations in the HBR console. The backup solution offers high performance and low costs. In the HBR console, you can restore data that is accidentally deleted from your on-premises NAS file system. This ensures data security.

Benefits

  • Simple configurations

    You can deploy lightweight backup clients on virtual machines or physical machines in an on-premises data center without specific hardware. You can configure scheduled backup plans in the HBR console.

  • High backup performance

    HBR allows multiple clients to concurrently back up a NAS file system. This greatly improves backup efficiency. For Isilon (Power Scale), a distributed storage solution of Dell EMC, HBR integrates storage-native APIs to greatly reduce the performance overhead caused by the backup client.

  • Deduplication and compression

    When HBR backs up data from a source NAS file system, the HBR client compresses and deduplicates the data. This minimizes the bandwidth of backing up data to the cloud and the storage space occupied by the backup data.

  • Immutable backup against accidental or malicious deletion

    HBR provides the immutable backup feature based on backup vaults. Backup data cannot be deleted by any account or method before the configured retention period expires.

  • Geo-redundancy

    If you need to back up data to a remote location, you can create a mirror vault for a backup vault to quickly protect critical data.

How it works

You need to perform the following steps: 1. Install and activate the HBR client on virtual machines or physical machines in your on-premises data center. 2. Log on to the HBR console to add a NAS data source. 3. Use the installed HBR client to back up the specified files on the NAS file system.

When a backup plan is running, the HBR client scans the specified folders to identify the NAS files to be backed up, compresses and deduplicates the source data, and then uploads incremental data to the cloud. If multiple clients are installed, you can back up NAS data in parallel to improve backup performance.

HBR uses a permanent incremental backup mechanism. Except for the first full backup job, each subsequent backup job uploads only the data that has changed compared with the previous backup job. A complete full backup is synthesized on the cloud to minimize network and storage consumption.

HBR allows you to back up data to Alibaba Cloud over the Internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), or Express Connect circuits. If you back up data over the Internet, you must make sure that the server on which the HBR client is installed can access the Internet. You do not need to expose the IP address of the server to the Internet.

Procedure

The following procedure shows how to back up on-premises NAS files in the HBR console.

Back up on-premises NAS files
  1. Activate HBR

    You are not charged for activating HBR. You are charged for the HBR client that you use to back up files and the storage usage of backup vaults. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items.

  2. Install the HBR client

    After you install the HBR client on your on-premises server, you can back up files from the server.

  3. Back up a NAS file system

    When you create a backup plan, configure the backup vault, source path, backup cycle, and retention period. HBR starts the backup plan and continuously backs up files from the NAS file system.

  4. Restore a NAS file system

    If an exception occurs in a NAS file system, you can create a restore job based on the data that has been backed up.

Billing

You are charged for the backup of on-premises NAS files based on the following billable items:

Storage usage: HBR provides two types of backup storage: locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS). You are charged based on the storage usage of the HBR backup vaults. You can view the storage usage of backup vaults on the Overview page in the HBR console. For more information, see Pricing.

In addition, HBR charges the following fees based on specific backup configurations or operations:
  • Geo-redundancy fees

    If you create a remote mirror vault to copy data from a backup vault in an Alibaba Cloud region to another region for geo-redundancy, you are charged for the storage capacity of the mirror vault and the cross-region replication traffic. The size of the mirror vault is the same as that of the source backup vault, and the pricing is the same.

  • Outbound traffic fees

    If you retrieve data to an on-premises NAS file system over the Internet, you are charged for the outbound traffic.

Traffic fees are calculated based on the data volume.

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