Essential Best Practice for Cloud Backup | Flexible Engine Cloud Provider

8 min readJun 19, 2020

Introduction

With the increasing amount of company’s data, the task of protecting it becomes more challenging, especially in the cloud. As a result, the demand for reliable backup and recovery solutions has never been greater.

According to IBM, Backup and restore refers to technologies and practices for making periodic copies of data to a separate, secondary device and then using those copies to recover the critical company’s data in cases where data is lost or damaged due to different events such as power outage, cyberattack, human error or disaster.

Backup Strategy

The first step in creating a backup strategy is to determine recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

Recovery time objective, or RTO, refers to how quickly the company needs to recover its data.
Recovery point objective, or RPO, refers to how frequently the company need to back up its data.

Other factors include :

Data security and physical distance.
Whether you’re protecting personal, small business, or enterprise data
Whether you’re backing up just data, data and applications, or entire physical computers or virtual machines
The backup methods your backup cloud service provider offers
Your budget

Backup Method

Backup Types Explained

Incremental and Differential Backups — Background — Part1

Incremental and Differential Backups — Background — Part2

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup backs up your data via the internet to a virtual backup server at a remote data center operated by a cloud services provider.

According to IBM, Cloud backup is the most flexible type of backup. You can use it to back up files, application data, or entire physical or virtual servers. You can schedule backups as frequently or infrequently as you like. Because cloud backup servers are typically virtualized, you can scale easily and cost-effectively as needed. Cloud backup eliminates the need to physically move backup media to another location for protection against local power outages or disasters.

Flexible Engine Backup Methods

Before getting started , if you’re using AWS cloud provider for building your company’s backup, this whitepaper can be helpful :)

In this article , i will be using Flexible Engine Cloud Provider.

In order to ensure a good data protection strategy, you need to guarantee the following :

Durability : You need to ensure that your data in stored in a reliable way
Security : You need to ensure that your data in encrypted while it transit is the remote backup server. This can be done by creating VPN Tunnel to encrypt the traffic and Access lists and Security groups to filter the incoming and outgoing traffic.
Global infrastructure: You need to ensure that you’ve the possiblity to create your company’s backup in different regions.
Compliance: You need to ensure that your Cloud Provider in certified for compliance. (Flexible Engine is certified for compliance with
standards such as ISO9001, ISO14001, ISO20000–1, ISO27001.)

Designing a Backup and Recovering Solution

We’ve different level of recovery :

File-level recovery
Volume-level recovery
Application-level recovery ( such as databases)
Image-level recovery

Flexible Engine provides four main backup services :

Object Storage Service for Data Protection

Flexible Engine provides an Object Storage Service (OBS) which provides a secure, reliable, and cost-effective data storage capabilities, such as bucket creation, modification, and deletion, as well as object upload, download, and deletion.

Volume Backup Service

When services are running in Flexible Engine Elastic Cloud Server, compute instances can use Elastic Volume Service (EVS) disks to store and access primary data.

Volume Backup Service (VBS) provides snapshot-based data protection for Elastic Volume Service (EVS) disks. These data backups can be used to restore data quickly.

The snapshot is a copy of the EVS disk at a certain point in time. VBS supports both full and incremental backup modes. By default, the system performs a full backup initially, and then performs incremental backups. You can use a data backup generated in either backup mode to restore the source EVS disk to the state the EVS disk was in when the backup was created.

Check the documentation to set up your EVS backup.

Note that we also can configure a backup policy for disks. With backup policies configured, data on EVS disks can be periodically backed up to improve data security.

Cloud Server Backup Service

Cloud Server Backup Service (CSBS) offers the backup protection service for Elastic Cloud Servers (ECSs). It works based on the consistency snapshot technology for Elastic Volume Service (EVS) disks, meaning you can seamlessly use backup data to restore ECS data.

By default, CSBS executes a full backup for an ECS that has not been backed up using CSBS, and performs incremental backups subsequently. Both full backup and incremental backup can restore an ECS to the state at the backup point in time.

CSBS combines ECS and Object Storage Service (OBS) to back up ECS data to object storage, enhancing backup data security. The Figure below shows the CSBS product architecture.

The CSBS rely on the following Flexible Engine Services :

Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) : CSBS can back up data of the EVS disks on an ECS, and restore backup data to the EVS disks of an ECS so as to retrieve lost or corrupted data. Generated backups can be used to create images for fast restoring the service running environment.
Object Storage Service (OBS) : CSBS combines ECS and OBS to back up ECS data to object storage, enhancing backup data security.
Volume Backup Service (VBS) : CSBS and VBS both provide data backup protection.

The differences between CSBS and VBS

Based on the Documentation, CSBS mainly creates consistency backups online for all EVS disks of the ECS. You are advised to use CSBS in a scenario where the whole ECS, including its configurations and specifications, as well as the consistency data of multiple EVS disks, is protected, or if you want to use backups to create images and provision ECSs, in order to quickly restore the service running environment.

In comparison, VBS generally creates online backups for a single EVS disk (system or data disk) of the ECS. If the system disk does not have user-defined data, you can perform the backup only for the data disk using VBS to safeguard your data and reduce the backup costs.

CSBS backups will also be displayed on the VBS page and can be used to restore individual disks.

Snapshots

VM snapshots are a simple and effective way to roll a virtual machine back to a point in time. Mistakenly, some still view snapshots as a backup because they allow a VM to return to a previous state. Snapshots are not backups. It is dangerous to consider VM snapshots an actual backup copy of data. While many backup products use snapshots as part of a feature set, a snapshot alone is not a backup.

VM snapshots preserve the state and data of a virtual machine at a specific point in time so that if something goes wrong, you can go back to that point before it occurred.

The state of the machine includes the virtual machine’s power state of powered-on, powered-off or suspended. The virtual machine data consists of all files, memory, devices on the network, and virtual network interface cards.

Snapshots are generally used for development and testing purposes. VM snapshots can be used as a quick failsafe to be able to rollback before a patch, an upgrade, a test, or unsafe operations were performed on a VM.

Snapshots can be used in production environments but should be done with purpose. Snapshots should can be used if you are performing an update that could harm your system. But again, snapshots are not a full copy of a virtual hard disk. If the virtual disk is deleted or storage or infrastructure fails, snapshots cannot restore the VM.

Snapshots can also effect the performance of your VM if snapshots are kept running for a long period of time.

VMware recommends only using 2 to 3 snapshots in a chain and never running a snapshot for more than 72 hours to keep performance high.

Backups

Backups are an autonomous copy of your data and or your virtual machine in general. Unlike Snapshots, Backups offer a full VM copy so a single point of disk failure doesn’t equal catastrophic data loss which means they allow the recreation of a VM or data without any reliance on the source virtual machine disk. Also, Unlike snapshots, VM backups can be moved to the cloud, a separate location, or offsite for safe storage.

Backups can provide granular features that snapshots cannot. Image-level backups offer a variety of recovery options including the ability to recover a entire VM or individual files or applications.

Resume of the Differences Between a Backup and a Snapshot

The Difference between a Snapshot, an Image and a Backup

An ECS snapshot is a backup of a single ECS volume. The ECS snapshot contains all the data stored on the ECS volume at the time the ECS snapshot was created.

An image is a backup of an entire ECS instance associated with an ECS snapshot. This ECS snapshot is the backup of an individual ECS volumes attached to the ECS instance at the time the image was created.

Image Management Service

An image is an Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) or a Bare Metal Server (BMS) template that contains an operating system (OS) or service data and necessary application software, such as database software. Images are categorized into public, private, and shared images.

Image Management Service (IMS) allows you to manage the lifecycle of images. You can create ECSs or BMSs from a public, private, or shared image. You can also create a private image from an ECS or external image file.

After you have created the image of your ECs instance, you can use it to re-create the instance or launch more copies of the instance. You can also
copy the image from one region to another for application migration or disaster recovery.

Database Backup Approaches

If you are running your own database on an ECS instance, you can back up data to files using native tools such as MySQL 9 , Oracle 10 , MSSQL 11 , PostgreSQL 12 , running database backup scripts and then creating an image, snapshots or backup of the volum disk or the VM running the database using one of the methods described above.