A common theme of question asked by people new to NetWorker is whether it supports a push or pull recovery model.
The answer, as you’d expect for an enterprise backup product, is both. However, the recoveries processes aren’t named push and pull.
If you’re not aware of push and pull recovery models, they work thusly:
- A push recovery model is where all recovery requests are handled by the backup administrator, or at least, on the backup server, and the data retrieved is transferred out to the client.
- A pull recovery model has the client that wishes to receive the data initiate the recovery and retrieve the data from the backup server.
NetWorker supports both, and in fact more, but it uses the term directed recoveries.
Technically, all recoveries in NetWorker are directed. They involve three clients, which are:
- Source – the host from where the data was originally backed up;
- Target – the host that the data is to be recovered from;
- Control – the host that initiates the data.
Now, because the backup server has the NetWorker client software on it, it can be any one of those clients. A workgroup style “push” recovery would typically work with clients aligned as follows:
- Source and Target – Host where the data came from originally
- Control – The backup server
On the other hand, a workgroup style “pull” recovery would typically work with clients aligned:
- Source, Target and Control – The host where the data came from originally.
NetWorker’s directed recovery model is more powerful and flexible than the above two examples, though. For example, you can run a recovery where all three hosts are different machines – e.g.:
- Source – Production database server
- Target – Development database server
- Control – Backup server
In this situation the directed recovery would be used to act as a means of getting data from production into the development area.
So the answer to that original question is: yes, NetWorker supports a push recovery model. And yes, NetWorker supports a pull recovery model. But it also supports more.