Promoting a Secondary Copy to Primary Copy

If a primary copy becomes inoperative due to a storage media failure or a library or network malfunction, you can promote a secondary copy to primary copy. Promoting a secondary copy allows you to continue operations as before, to migrate from one storage to another without impacting client-side backups, and make repairs without interrupting backup and restore operations. This minimizes the risk of data loss or system downtime during maintenance or planned upgrades.

Requirements

• The secondary copy must be a synchronous copy.

• You must have the user permissions to create a storage policy copy. For more information, see Storage Policy Management Permissions.

• To promote a secondary copy that is disabled, enable the secondary copy and then promote it.

• You cannot promote Air Gap Protect copies, global secondary tape copies, archive copies, and snapshot copies.

Procedure

1. From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Manage > Plans.

   The Plans page appears.

2. Click the plan that contains the secondary copy that you want to promote.

   The plan page appears.

3. On the Backup destinations tab, under Regions, for the secondary copy that you want to promote, click the action button , and then click Convert to primary.

   The Convert to primary dialog box appears.

4. Specify when to convert the copy:

   • Convert immediately: Convert the secondary copy to primary copy immediately.

     Caution

     This option is not recommended because all running backup and auxiliary jobs for this plan will be killed, and data might be lost.

   • Synchronize and convert: The Commvault software waits up to the specified time for synchronization of copies to complete before conversion.

     During this time, all pending jobs from the source copy are copied to the selected copy.

     If all the jobs are completed before the specified time, the software converts the secondary copy to primary copy.

     • Force the copy conversion after: After the specified time, the Commvault software force kills any running backup and auxiliary jobs, and converts the secondary copy to primary copy. The copies might not be synchronized.

     • Fail the copy conversion after: After the specified time, if jobs are still running, the copy promotion fails.

   Caution

   If you try to promote a cloud copy as primary and make the disk copy as secondary, you might incur egress charges from the cloud vendor.

5. Click Submit.

Results

Orange icons for the copies indicate that the conversion of the secondary copy to primary copy is in process, and the primary copy is in maintenance during the process.

If the copy conversion request succeeds or fails, an event is created and an alert is triggered to notify the user. To view the event, see Viewing Events.

After a secondary copy is converted to a primary copy, all properties of both the copies are retained.