Disaster Recovery guidelines

High availability and fast recovery is of extreme importance for mission critical applications like Acronis Access. Due to planned or unplanned circumstances ranging from local hardware failures to network disruptions to maintenance tasks, it may be required to provision the means for restoring Acronis Access to a working state in a very short period of time.

Introduction:

For mission critical applications like Acronis Access, high availability is of extreme importance. Due to various circumstances ranging from local hardware failures to network disruptions to maintenance tasks, it may be required to provision the means for restoring Acronis Access to a working state in a very short period of time.

There are different ways to implement disaster recovery, including backup-restore, imaging, virtualization and clustering. We will describe the backup-restore approach in the following sections.

Description of the Acronis Access elements:

Acronis Access is a solution composed of several discrete but interconnected elements:

Acronis Access Gateway Server

Note: Normally located here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Acronis\Access\Gateway Server

Acronis Access Server

Note: Normally located here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Acronis\Access\Access Server

Acronis Access Configuration Utility

Note: Normally located here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Acronis\Access\Configuration Utility

File Store

The location of the File Store is set during the installation when you first use the Configuration Utility.

Note: The FileStore structure contains user files and folders in encrypted form. This structure can be copied or backed up using any standard file copy tool (robocopy, xtree). Normally this structure should be located in a high availability network volume or NAS so the location may differ from the default.

PostGreSQL database. This is a discrete element running as a Windows service, installed and used by Acronis Access. The Acronis Access database is one of the most critical elements because it maintains all configurations, relationships between users and files, and file metadata.

All those components are needed in order to build a working instance of Acronis Access.

Resources needed to implement a fast recovery process

The resources needed to fulfill the disaster recovery process are:

• Appropriate hardware to host the operating system, application and its data. The hardware must meet the system and software requirements for the application.
• A backup and restore process in place to ensure all software and data elements are available at the time the switch is needed.
• Network connectivity, including internal and external firewall and routing rules that permit users to access the new node with no or minimal need to change client side settings.
• Network access for Acronis Access to contact an Active Directory domain controller and SMTP server.
• Fast or automated DNS switching ability to redirect incoming request to the secondary node.

The process

Backup Setup

The recommended approach to provide a safe and fast recovery scenario can be described like this:

1. Have an installation of Acronis Access, including all elements in the secondary, restore, node. If this is not possible, a full (source) machine backup or image is a good alternative. In virtualized environments, periodic snapshots prove to be effective and inexpensive.
2. Backup the Acronis Access server software suite (all elements mentioned above, including the entire Apache Software branch) regularly. Use any standard, corporate class backup solution for the task.
3. Backup the FileStore as frequently as possible. A standard backup solution can be used, but an automated differential copy tool is a good and sometimes preferred alternative due to the amount of data involved. A differential copy minimizes the time this operation takes by updating what is different between the source and target FileStores.
4. Backup the Acronis Access database as frequently as possible. This is performed by an automated database dump script triggered by Windows Task Scheduler. The database dump should then be backed up by a standard backup tool.

Recovery

Provided the conditions described in the section above have been met and implemented, the process to bring online the backup resources is relatively simple:

1. Boot up the recovery node. Adjust any network configuration like IP Address, Host Name if needed. Test Active Directory connectivity and SMTP access,
2. If needed restore the most recent Acronis Access software suite backup.
3. Verify that Tomcat is not running (Windows Control Panel/Services).
4. If needed, restore the FileStore. Make sure the relative location of the FileStore is the same as it was in the source computer. If this is not the case, the location will need to be adjusted by using the Configuration Utility.
5. Verify that the PostgreSQL service is running (Windows Control Panel/Services).
6. Restore the Acronis Access database.
7. Start the Acronis Access Tomcat service.
8. Migrate DNS to point to the new node.
9. Verify Active Directory and SMTP are working