Initially Pause Replication & Other Q's

Question

1) Do I want to check this off when seeding to disk or not? Will it just catch up after the drive is consumed if I pause it? 
 2) I assume the "orphan chain" it refers to are incremental backup performed before the replication core is seeded. Will the replication core sort all this out on it's own after consumption? 
 3) Do I need to take all the backups from the primary core? It would be nice to just take a base and a few recent. Is this what the max size thing means? 
 4) The rollup jobs on the primary core seemed to balk while all this was running. Should I pause backups while I do all of this? 
 I'm going to write a guide once all this is done.

Tim Seymour · Accepted Answer

1. There is no reason to pause replication while seeding. If anything you want it to keep running so that the new backups are replicated while the seed drive is in process of travel and import on the target. 
 2. Orphan chain refers to instances where replication is already set up and there are different retention policies or possibly orphans created by previously failed seeding attempts. If this is your first time replicating and seeding, just use the defaults. There is no need to do anything special. Replication will sort everything out on its own. 
 3. You have to take all the backups from the primary core. The max size option is for specifying the max seed file size in a single location. Say you had 8 TB of data to seed but you only had 5 x 2 TB seed drives. You could specify the max size at 1.8 TB so that you don't fill up the drive completely and then you could have it write to each location one after another. Very few people use the max size option since the job will run until it fills up whatever target location you specified for the seed and then it will ask for another location. 
 4. Rollup is blocked by a seed job. You don't want to delete recovery points that are in the process of being written to a seed drive. Just let rollup be blocked. It's not a big deal. Seeding does not block new backups, so just let back ups run. No need to pause them unless you want to have all of your repository time dedicated to writing the seed (and therefore better performance and a quicker job).

Tim Seymour · Answer

That option is for when you are setting up replication for all agents at one time but only want to seed a few of the machines. Say you have 10 machines and 9 of them are less than 200 GB combined. Then you have 1 machine that is 5 TB in size. You want to seed the one machine but not the others. If you set up replication and choose all protected machines during the add machines to replication wizard, then you can uncheck the "include all protected machines" during the seed setup and include only the one machine you want to seed. That way you only have one machine in the seed and the rest will replicate over the wire.

Initially Pause Replication & Other Q's

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