This topic contains the following sections:

Druva uses a deduplication technique that makes use of a variable block sizing technique based on file type to determine globally duplicated data across all your servers. The Hybrid Workloads agent only transfers unique blocks of data to the cloud. This ensures massive bandwidth savings of up to 90% in many cases.

Druva backs up your data in the cloud hosted by Amazon. Druva relies on the robustness and the security standards of Amazon Web Services to ensure that your backup data stays safe and secure.

Druva provides support for backup of MDF, NDF, and LDF files.

Druva is designed to work efficiently even for organizations with intermittent connectivity. If Hybrid Workloads agents cannot reach Druva Cloud, backups or restores stop temporarily. When connectivity resumes, backups or restores start again. A single backup can, therefore, span across multiple backup windows.

A recovery point is a point-in-time image of your backup data. To know the type of recovery points that Druva supports, see Common terms.

Druva retains the data from your server that is not operational. You can restore the data to another server.

Yes, you can. Druva retains data from the servers that you deprecate. To set up new servers in their place, restore the data from the deprecated servers to the new servers.

The term "warm" and "cold" signify how old your data is. Restores using warm recovery points are performed for data that is no more than 90 days old. The data is stored in the warm storage. At the end of 90 days, the data is transferred to cold storage, where it resides for as long as you define in the retention policies. For such data, you must use cold recovery points to perform a restore. To know more about hot restore and cold restore, see Common terms.

Druva stores backups for as long as you need. You can choose from multiple data retention options - as short as 90 days and up to the end of time for retaining data. Data older than 90 days is stored in cold storage. For data that is less than 90 days old, you can perform an on-demand restore.

No, you cannot. However, you can create backup sets to back up the content from your secondary servers and your tertiary servers. Druva will back up data from your primary, secondary, and tertiary servers according to the schedule defined in the backup policy.

Yes, you can specify the bandwidth limitation for backup.

No, you cannot specify the bandwidth limitation for restore.

After the expiration of your contract, Druva does not back up your servers. However, your data is retained on the cloud. You can choose to extend your contract, and then perform a restore of the data.

No, you cannot export Druva data. However, you can choose to restore data to the server to which it belongs, or a new server.

Organizations in Druva are independent entities by design. Druva does not have a functionality that allows inter-Organizational restore.

Yes, Druva supports backup and restore of SQL Servers running on the on-premise physical and virtual infrastructure, as well as cloud infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, Azure VMs, Google Compute Engines, and so on.

Druva supports agent-based backup for databases that enables you to leverage SQL agent and deploy it in any of the supported Operating Systems on an Azure VM and protect these workloads. Configuration and backup/restore workflows remain the same whether data is located on-premise or on any Cloud like Azure. Another added advantage is that you can restore the data to any target residing either in the customer’s data center or private or public cloud.
Databases like SQL on Azure VM instances can be backed up using the agent-based backup method.

After you upgrade the client,

To know how you can configure SQL servers for backup, see Introduction to Druva for SQL servers.

Before configuring your SQL servers, we recommend that you read SQL server prerequisites and limitations. The checklist should help you perform a configuration that is best-suited for your environment.

You cannot create MS-SQL backup sets for Hybrid Workloads agents older than version 4.7.1. However, backups for the old backup sets continue to run as configured.

No. Druva cannot discover MS-SQL instances and AGs running on the server installed with an agent older than version 4.7.1.

Druva creates a new backup set for each instance present on the physical server. All the newly created backup sets have the same backup policy and same content rule as that of the earlier backup sets for All instances.

The first backup of your servers is a full backup. Thereafter, Druva performs an incremental backup. Additionally, Druva also supports differential and transaction log backups of SQL servers. To know more, see Common terms.

To know how to back up your SQL servers, see Back up servers. To know how to restore SQL servers, see SQL server restore.

To understand the workflow at the time of backup, see full backup, differential backup, and log backup.
To know how Druva restores your file server data, see SQL server restore.

Check whether you have SQL standalone or SQL FCI installation done. In case you have SQL FCI, upgrade to build 4.7.1 or later and follow setup instructions as described in Configure Druva for the backup of databases in SQL Failover Cluster Instance (FCI).

If the first backup is taken on the disk and the next backup is taken on the Virtual device / URL, then SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) replaces the path selected for disk backup with the latest backup path. This is the current behavior.
However, when a backup is taken on a virtual device, SSMS removes the disk backup path set in the native SQL backups after the backups are completed. This problem occurs only when the backup is configured via native utility and Druva.
It is important to understand the backup strategy and why the same database has to be backed up twice. This problem will never arise if the backup is only configured via Druva.