User guide

50 | Working with the AppAssure 5 Core
About Seeding
Replication begins with seeding: the initial transfer of deduplicated base images and
incremental snapshots of the protected agents, which can add up to hundreds or
thousands of gigabytes of data. Initial replication can be seeded to the target core
using external media to transfer the initial data to the target core. This is typically
useful for large sets of data or sites with slow links.
The data in the seeding archive is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated. If the
total size of the archive is larger than the space available on the removable media,
the archive can span across multiple devices based on the available space on the
media. During the seeding process, the incremental recovery points are replicated to
the target site. After the target core consumes the seeding archive, the newly
replicated incremental recovery points automatically synchronize.
Seeding is a two-part process (also known as copy-consume):
 The first part involves copying, which is the writing of the initial replicated data
to a removable media source. Copying duplicates all of the existing recovery
points from the source core to a local removable storage device such as a USB
drive. After copying is complete, you must then transport the drive from the
source core location to the remote target core location.
 The second part is consuming, which occurs when a target core receives the
transported drive and copies the replicated data to the repository. The target core
then consumes the recovery points and uses them to form replicated agents.
Because large amounts of data need to be copied to the portable storage device, an
eSATA, USB 3.0, or other high-speed connection to the portable storage device is
recommended.
While it is possible to seed the base data over a network connection, it is not recommended. Initial
seeding involves potentially very large amounts of data, which could overwhelm a typical WAN
connection. For example, if the seed data measures 10 GB and the WAN link transfers 24 Mbps, the
transfer could take more than 40 days to complete.
While replication of incremental snapshots can occur between the source and target cores before
seeding is complete, the replicated snapshots transmitted from the source to the target will remain
“orphaned” until the initial data is consumed, and they are combined with the replicated base
images. For more information about orphaned recovery points, see “Deleting an Orphaned
Recovery Point Chain” on page 140.