SUMMARY
Self-serve recovery is a feature of Unitrends Cloud, this process allows you to perform Appliance Disaster Recovery from a hot backup copy target without the self-serve feature.
ISSUE
You need to perform disaster recovery of a source appliance and self-serve recovery is not setup between the target appliance and the source appliance; most commonly this is because the hot backup copy target is a private appliance and not a part of Unitrends Cloud. You may also see an error similar to:
Failed to find version of unitrends-rr on [ApplianceName]. Is the package installed? Error setting up the new appliance for disaster recovery, exiting.
To avoid these steps being necessary it is strongly recommended that you follow best practices to implement a 3-2-1 rule of backup copy, making use both of hot backup copies and cold backup copies such as to a NAS device, hard disk, 3rd-party cloud, etc. Please note that any cold copy other than to legacy tape media can be used to import your system state. If you have limited space for local copies, configure a NAS share with a weekly archive of any one small client (including a VM or database for which no backups occur) and set the job for overwrite. Typically less than 1GB of space is required to preserve your appliance's system state.
RESOLUTION
Before you begin, login to the newly-imaged or redeployed source appliance and make sure that the new host name of the source is DIFFERENT from the original host name. If the host name is the same as it was prior to the reimage or redeployment you may change that by navigating to Configure > Appliances > (select your appliance) > Edit > General, then enter the new host name and click Save; if you were logged in to the appliance via SSH (PuTTY) it is recommended to logout and back in. Once the host name is different you may then follow the steps from the administration guide to setup the target appliance as a hot backup copy target.
1. Login to the web GUI of the new source appliance and navigate to Configure > Appliances > Backup Copy Targets, select Add Target > NAS > CIFS, using the IP address of your new source appliance in the "Host" field and the word "samba" in the "Share Name" field.
2. Login to the web GUI of the hot backup copy target appliance and navigate to Configure > Appliances > Backup Copy Targets, select Add Target > NAS > CIFS, using the IP address of your target appliance in the "Host" field and the word "samba" in the "Share Name" field.
3. Create an on-demand backup copy job to the samba directory by navigating to Protect > Copied Assets, select a single small asset from the original source (such as a database) to copy, click Backup Copy and click Next.
4. Select the Backup Copy Target that you just created from step 1 under Options, then under Job Detail select "Now" for when you want to run this job. If you set the date range for the job such that it doesn't include any backups of this protected asset the job will only include the latest system state received from the original source appliance.
5. Open a SSH (PuTTY) session to the target appliance and locate the archive directory:
ls -rlasth /backups/samba
Output should look like:
[root@Target_Hostname ~]# ls -la /backups/samba/
total 216
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 188K Aug 16 12:20 custom_certificate_authority.pdf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13K Aug 16 12:20 cmc_cert_util_usage.pdf
-rw-r----- 1 root root 37 Sep 28 07:05 .unitrends_serial
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4.0K Sep 28 07:30 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 138 Sep 28 07:33 .
-rw-r----- 1 root root 38 Sep 28 07:33 .asset
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 146 Sep 28 07:33 2018-09-28_07_33_56
6. Copy the folder that matches today's date to the samba directory of the new source appliance's IP as seen by the target, the example below uses the folder found in step 4:
[root@Target_Hostname ~]# cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost vCenter-RRC 10.10.10.5 Hostname.mydomain.local Hostname 172.17.3.6 Source_Hostname [root@Target_Hostname ~]# scp -r /backups/samba/2018-09-28_07_33_56 root@172.17.3.6:/backups/samba/If SSH access is not available, you can also copy this folder by other means, such as opening the samba share on both appliances in Windows Explorer (navigate to \\192.168.x.x\samba) and copying from one appliance to the other. Then copy any .asset or .unitrends_serial files from /backups/samba/ on the target appliance to the same location on the source:
[root@Target_Hostname samba]# cd /backups/samba/ [root@Target_Hostname samba]# ls -la total 216 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 112 Sep 28 08:04 . drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Dec 6 08:02 .. -rw-r----- 1 root root 37 Sep 28 07:05 .unitrends_serial drwxr-x--- 2 root root 146 Sep 28 07:33 2018-09-28_07_33_56 -rw-r----- 1 root root 38 Sep 28 07:33 .asset -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12610 Dec 6 07:43 cmc_cert_util_usage.pdf -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 192337 Dec 6 07:43 custom_certificate_authority.pdf [root@Target_Hostname samba]# scp -r .asset .unitrends_serial root@172.17.3.6:/backups/samba
7. Proceed to use the disaster recovery steps for a cold backup copy target, selecting the name you configured for the cold backup copy target from step 6.
8. Remove the backup copy targets created in steps 1 and 2 on BOTH the target and source appliances respectively, and delete the archive folders from the samba directories of both appliances using the following command, replacing the folder name in this command with the name found in step 4:
rm -rf /backups/samba/2018-09-28_07_33_56