Knowledge Base

Initial Seeding is an extra service with which you can send your backup to Acronis via regular post and have it uploaded

This article applies to:

• Acronis Backup & Recovery 10
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11

Description

(!) For country availability see:

• Acronis Backup & Recovery Online: List of Supported Countries
• Acronis Backup & Recovery Online Large Scale Recovery and Initial Seeding: Country Availability

Initial Seeding is an extra service that lets you save an initial full backup locally and then send it to Acronis on a hard disk drive.

You may want to use this service if transferring the backup data over the Internet takes too much time.

If you are not sure whether you need Initial Seeding, you can check the approximate data transfer table:

If you are not sure about your Internet connection speed, you can check it with speedtest.net.

Once the hard disk is received, Acronis uploads the backup to the online storage. After that, you can add incremental backups to this full backup, either manually or on a schedule.

(!) Since the online backup file is not a regular *.tib file, you cannot restore from it, unless it is uploaded to the online storage.

A process reverse to Initial Seeding is Large Scale Recovery (LSR). With LSR, you can get your backup(s) on a hard disk, and then restore from it without having the data transferred over the Internet. See Acronis Backup & Recovery: Large Scale Recovery.

Initial Seeding step-by-step

1. Make sure you have a license for Initial Seeding. See Acronis Backup & Recovery Online: Initial Seeding Licensing and Acronis Backup & Recovery Online: Purchasing Initial Seeding;
2. Decide what type of HDD you want to use. See Acronis Backup & Recovery Initial Seeding: Supported HDD Types;
3. Create an Initial Seeding backup. See Acronis Backup & Recovery 10: Creating Initial Seeding Backup;
4. Carefully package the HDD with the Initial Seeding backup. See Packaging Your HDD;
5. Check the shipping address on the Initial seeding/Recovery tab of your account management page by clicking Show data center address.
6. Send the HDD with the backup.

   You select the shipping priority for the hard drive with the backup.

   The Initial Seeding will start within 8 hours of when the package is received (packages are received once per business day) with an average transfer rate of 18 GB/hr. That translates into 6 hours of upload time for 100 GB.

More information

See also Acronis Backup & Recovery: Large Scale Recovery.

(!) See also Acronis Backup & Recovery Online: Disk Defragmentation Is Not Recommended.