Does the initial vaulting task replicate all existing restore points? Or do we select a point-in-time (like 90 days ago)?
The software allows for selecting which Archives to vault and which point-in-time.
Does the vaulting task then run on an hourly/daily/weekly schedule, synchronizing all backups since the previous run and removing restore points that have been expired/purged?
The vaulting task can be best thought of as writing to the cloud as write-once media. Each time the vaulting task runs it will select the most recent restore points (or the specific date range) and add these restore points to the cloud vault. All compression and deduplication of data is persevered so after this initial baseline vaulting task runs, the subsequent runs upload smaller amount of data. Any given restore-point can be recovered from the cloud from the vault.
After a time, most customers will recycle the cloud store by creating a new vault (i.e. 2022, 2023, etc.) then depending on business rules delete the older vault. From your perspective the vaults look just like a normal Store on local disk with difference being the data must be downloaded before restoring.
Does the vaulting task need to be modified if we add/remove servers or workstations?
The software allows you either automatically select Archive to vault, or manually select – same as the Store Copy Task is configured. If ‘All Archives’ option is selected, then any new Archives will automatically be vaulted, if you go with the ‘manual’ selection, then you would need to add the new Archives before they would be vaulted.
Another concern would be processing resources. We have almost all our backups scheduled between 5:00pm and midnight. Then we have a verify level 1 task that starts at 1:00am and runs 8-10 hours.
You would generally run the vaulting task once a day after the your verify task runs. Bandwidth usage can be configure to limit network usage during business hours.
One or more vaulting tasks can be configured and run on different schedules depending on the recovery point objective of a given data set (Archive).
Do we still maintain local backups and then just copy them to the Cloud?
Yes, this is correct. It is a vaulting service that consolidates and encrypts the data and stores it in the cloud as a write-once operation. It preserves all points in time that are selected for vaulting and deduplication is maintained to minimize space used in the cloud. It is super-efficient and works really well. Vaults will appear in User Interface, showing the archives vaulted.