How to provide backup and standby protection using SnapMirror

By setting up a SnapMirror relationship between the SnapVault secondary storage system and a SnapMirror destination or NearStore system, you can provide backup and standby protection for the SnapVault secondary storage system data.

Following are the process for backup and standby protection for the secondary storage system data:

Use the SnapMirror destination device as a standby device to be activated as an alternate SnapVault secondary storage if the original secondary storage device goes down.
Note: The SnapMirror destination systems cannot take advantage of the disk-space-saving benefits of volume cloning. If you used volume cloning on the original SnapVault secondary volume to store more than 255 Snapshot copies, the limit imposed on volumes by Data ONTAP, the SnapMirror destination volumes might need to be larger than the SnapVault secondary volumes if they are going to store the same amount of data.
Reestablishing backup and standby protection using this procedure, you have your original SnapMirror destination volumes as your SnapVault secondary volumes, and new volumes as your SnapMirror destination volumes.
Note: You could use the original SnapVault secondary volumes when they become available after the retention periods of Snapshot copies and files on the volumes expire, but retention periods are usually long enough that the volumes are not likely to be available.
An optional step, but one that you should avoid performing, is to return to the original backup and standby configuration. After you reestablish the backup and standby configuration, your SnapVault secondary volumes are protected with a SnapMirror replication, but the two backup systems are reversed (the system that was your standby is now your secondary and the system that was your secondary is now your standby). Instead of returning to the original configuration, it is better that the storage systems you use for your SnapVault secondaries and their associated SnapMirror standbys have the same configuration such that their roles can be reversed, if necessary.

Setting up backup and standby protection for SnapVault
You can set up the SnapMirror backup and standby protection for the SnapVault secondary storage system and fail over to the standby system, if needed.
Reestablishing backup and standby protection for SnapVault
To reestablish SnapMirror backup and standby protection for the new SnapVault secondary storage system, you need to perform an initial SnapMirror transfer from the SnapVault secondary to a new volume.
Returning to the original backup and standby configuration
You can return to the original backup and standby configuration.
Limitations to compliance backup and standby service
There are limitations to the backup and standby service.

Parent topic: Guidelines for using the SnapLock for SnapVault feature