7. Migrating Backups from Older Solutions

By means of Backup Gateway, you can migrate backups from Acronis Storage 1.5 and Acronis Storage Gateway 1.6 and 1.7 to a storage backend of your choice: the local storage cluster, external NFS, or public cloud.

Migration to NFS backends is not available, however, if multiple nodes are selected as Backup Gateway.

Important

Before you proceed, make sure that the destination storage has enough space for both existing and new backups.

The migration procedure can be described as follows:

  1. Root credentials for SSH access to the chosen source storage are provided to Backup Gateway.

  2. Backup Gateway sets up a proxy on the source storage that starts redirecting requests incoming from Acronis Backup Agents from the source storage to Backup Gateway.

  3. Backup Gateway starts relocating backups to the chosen storage backend. The data that remains to be migrated is shown in the Migration Backlog section on the Backup Gateway Overview screen. When the backlog empties, all data has been migrated.

    After the migration has started, the data of new and incremental backups is stored on the destination storage. Backups from the source storage are pulled in the background. The entire process is transparent to backup agents, which continue working uninterrupted.

  4. To be able to dispose of the source storage after migration completes, requests from Acronis Backup Agents are directed straight to Backup Gateway, bypassing the proxy on the source storage. Steps that you need to take depend on how the source storage is registered in Acronis Backup Cloud: under the IP address or DNS name.

    • If the source storage is already registered under the DNS name, you need to change the IP address behind it to those of the Backup Gateway nodes.

    • If the source storage is registered under the IP address, it is strongly recommended to re-register Backup Gateway in Acronis Backup Cloud under a DNS name that resolves into the IP addresses of Backup Gateway nodes. Using a DNS name will provide a smoother transition and you will not need to reconfigure Acronis Backup Cloud even if you change nodes in the Backup Gateway (you will still need to adjust the IP addresses behind the DNS name accordingly).

      Alternatively, if you do not want to use a DNS name, you need to wait for the migration to complete, shut down both the source and destination machines, and reconfigure your network so that the public interface of the destination machine gets the IP address of the source machine.

The concrete steps that you need to perform in the admin panel to initiate backup migration are described in the next subsections.