Initially Pause Replication & Other Q's

1. There is no reason to pause replication while seeding. If anything you want it to keep running so that the new backups are replicated while the seed drive is in process of travel and import on the target.

2. Orphan chain refers to instances where replication is already set up and there are different retention policies or possibly orphans created by previously failed seeding attempts. If this is your first time replicating and seeding, just use the defaults. There is no need to do anything special. Replication will sort everything out on its own.

3. You have to take all the backups from the primary core. The max size option is for specifying the max seed file size in a single location. Say you had 8 TB of data to seed but you only had 5 x 2 TB seed drives. You could specify the max size at 1.8 TB so that you don't fill up the drive completely and then you could have it write to each location one after another. Very few people use the max size option since the job will run  until it fills up whatever target location you specified for the seed and then it will ask for another location.

4. Rollup is blocked by a seed job. You don't want to delete recovery points that are in the process of being written to a seed drive. Just let rollup be blocked. It's not a big deal. Seeding does not block new backups, so just let back ups run. No need to pause them unless you want to have all of your repository time dedicated to writing the seed (and therefore better performance and a quicker job).

The destination core is now consuming the seed drive but inbound replication is failing (timed out). Is this normal?

Maybe. Depends on how loaded down the target core is. What's the disk queue on the repo volume? Anything over 1 is a bottleneck. There are a lot of other things that can cause timeouts. Also, if a replication job sits in queue waiting to run for more than 2 hours it will timeout. So it could be jobs blocking replication that cause this too.

The target core has only one thing running and that is the consumption of the seed from my primary core. That seed is a chain for one server of about 1.6TB.

It paused for about 25 min and then failed with-

"Start of remote replication job timed out. Job is waiting for start during long time."

The job shows as cancelled on the target core and failed on the primary core.

yeah, so that message indicates that the job timed out because it couldn't start for a long time. Which simply means it sat in queue too long and was considered to no longer be valid. That's expected behavior.

It's going to try again before the seed is consumed (another 12 hours). I'm just going to let it finish consuming and hope the replication points self correct somehow after.

What is to correct? The job is failing because the seed is blocking it from running. So when the seed is done and replication can run the job will be able to start within the timeout and then it will replicate whatever is on the source but not on the target. Then it will be in sync and you'll be in business.

Just to follow up for anyone who reads this in the future this is exactly what happens. All the replication that failed got in sync after the seed was consumed.

Thanks again Tim.

Just to follow up for anyone who reads this in the future this is exactly what happens. All the replication that failed got in sync after the seed was consumed.

Thanks again Tim.