Creating a data archive

HYCU for Azure enables you to create an archive of your data and keep it for a longer period of time. By archiving data, the data is stored for future reference on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Your data is isolated from current activity and safely stored in a secure cloud archive location.

Prerequisite

Only if you plan to select a manually created storage account. A storage account is added to HYCU for Azure as a target. For instructions, see “Adding a storage account to HYCU for Azure”.

To access the Policies panel, in the navigation pane, click  Policies.

Procedure

  1. In the Policies panel, click  Archiving.
  2. Click  New.
  3. Enter a name for your data archive and, optionally, its description.

  4. Add any of the following archiving options to the list of the enabled options by clicking it:

    Daily Allows you to create a daily archive of data.
    Weekly Allows you to create a weekly archive of data.
    Monthly Allows you to create a monthly archive of data.
    Yearly Allows you to create a yearly archive of data.

  5. In the Start at field, specify the hour and the minute when the archiving task should start.

  6. From the Time zone drop-down menu, specify the appropriate time zone.
  7. Only if you have enabled the Weekly, Monthly, and/or Yearly archiving option. Specify when to archive data.

  8. For each enabled archiving option, do the following:

    1. In the Retention field, set the retention period to be used.

      n Note  Make sure that the retention period is longer than the RPO to prevent the data archive from expiring before a new backup is performed.

    2. From the Target drop-down menu, select a target that you want to use for storing the data archive.

      If you select the Automatically selected option, HYCU for Azure creates a storage account in the region of the virtual machine and uses it as a target for storing the archive data. If an automatically created storage account already exists, it is used instead.

    3. From the Access tier drop-down menu, select the access tier that you want to use for storing the data archive.

      If you select the Automatically selected option, an access tier is automatically selected depending on the specified retention.

  9. Click Save.

You can later edit any of the existing data archives (click  Edit and make the required modifications) or delete the ones that you do not need anymore (click  Delete). Keep in mind that you cannot modify an archive target if an archiving task is in progress on that target.

After you create a data archive, you can do the following:

  • Specify the data archive when creating a new policy. For details, see “Creating a custom policy”.
  • Include the data archive into an existing policy. To do so, select the policy, click  Edit, and then make the required modifications.