4. Connecting Acronis Backup Software to Storage Backends via Backup Gateway¶

The Backup Gateway storage access point (also called “gateway”) is intended for service providers who use Acronis Backup Cloud and/or Acronis Backup Advanced and want to organize an on-premise storage for their clients’ backed-up data.

Backup Gateway enables a service provider to easily configure storage for the proprietary deduplication-friendly data format used by Acronis.

Backup Gateway supports the following storage backends:

• storage clusters with software redundancy by means of erasure coding,
• NFS shares,
• public clouds, including a number of S3 solutions as well as Microsoft Azure, OpenStack Swift, and Google Cloud Platform.

While your choice should depend on scenario and requirements, it is recommended to keep Acronis backup data in the local storage cluster. In this case, you can have the best performance due to WAN optimizations and data locality. Keeping backups in an NFS share or a public cloud implies the unavoidable data transfer and other overhead, which reduces overall performance.

Take note of the following:

• When configuring Backup Gateway, you will need to provide the credentials of your administrator account in the Acronis backup software.
• In cases when not local but external storage (e.g., NFS) is used with Backup Gateway, redundancy has to be provided by said external storage. Backup Gateway does not provide data redundancy or perform data deduplication itself.
• To enable geo-replication for Backup Gateway, consult the Administrator’s Command Line Guide.