Using Instant Access in a Recovery Strategy

Once Instant Access is activated, backup instances appear as local, fully accessible (read/write) drives. For quick recovery of individual files, users can easily copy from an Instant Access drive to another drive on the local node. However, Instant Access can be used in more sophisticated ways as part of a recovery strategy:

• Files on the secondary are transparently available allowing you to continue to work while normal recovery runs in parallel to restore data to primary storage. See Modifying and Recovering. Since data can be modified while the Instant Access mapping is in effect, the modified data may need to be restored to complete the recovery process. Steps outside DPX can be used to recover the modified data. See Recovering Modified Data.

• Instant Access can be used in conjunction with SnapMirror for uninterrupted access to mirrored Block backups. For example, you can mirror Block backups from a storage system to an alternate secondary, such as a high-performance offsite storage system, then use Instant Access to give users rapid access to data on the offsite system. See Instant Access Mapping to the NetApp Alternate Secondary.

• Instant Access is an efficient backup verification tool since backup instances on the storage system are readily usable from a standby node. See Verifying a Block Backup by Using iSCSI Mapping.