If there is a requirement to extend the recovery ability to more than the 14 days that are available with disaster recovery, Zerto Virtual Replication provides an offsite backup option that enables saving the protected virtual machines offsite for up to one year in a state where they can easily be deployed. The recovery virtual machines are saved in a repository of offsite backups that can extend as far back as a year. These offsite backups are fixed points saved either daily or weekly. To save space the offsite backups can be compressed before they are stored in the repository.

When an offsite backup job starts, the Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) on the recovery site communicates with the VRA on the recovery site to create the backup files of the virtual machines in the VPG, including the data in the journal and saves these files in the repository.

To set up repositories to protect virtual machines in a VPG with offsite backup, see Setting Up Offsite Backups.

Setting up offsite backups is part of defining a VPG.

After initializing the VPG, Zerto Virtual Replication periodically checks that the time to run an offsite backup has not passed. At the scheduled backup time, the offsite backup is run and the offsite backup file stored in the specified repository.

Offsite backups are kept for the retention period specified in the VPG. Over time the number of stored offsite backups is reduced to save space.

To restore virtual machines to the recovery site, see Restoring an Offsite Backup.