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Cloud Backup:Create disk backups

Last Updated:Dec 05, 2023

Cloud Backup is integrated with the Alibaba Cloud snapshot service to provide agentless backup for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances and disks. Cloud Backup can create crash-consistent snapshots for all disks, including system disks and data disks. You can use these snapshots to back up or restore an entire disk.

Background information

Backup for ECS disks is a backup orchestration service that is provided by Cloud Backup based on the snapshot feature of ECS. You are billed for the usage of the Alibaba Cloud snapshot service. For more information, see Snapshots.

Precautions

You cannot use the disk backup feature to back up or restore local disks. For more information, see Local disks.

If you use local disks to store data, your data may be lost. We recommend that you use the ECS file backup feature to protect your files on local disks and use the database backup feature to protect your databases deployed in local disks. For more information, see Back up files from an ECS instance and Database backup.

Procedure

Important

When you add an ECS instance and disks, make sure that the disks are in the In Use or Unattached state. If the disks are in the In Use state, the ECS instance must be in the Running or Stopped state.

  1. Log on to the Cloud Backup console.

  2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Backup > Disk Backup.

  3. In the top navigation bar, select a region.

  4. In the upper-right corner of the Disk Backup page, click Disk Backup Wizard.

  5. In the Disk Backup Wizard panel, select the disk that you want to back up and click Next.

  6. In the Configure Backup Policy step, set the Backup Type parameter to Manual Backup or Auto Backup.

    • Manual Backup

      If Manual Backup is specified, you must enter the name of the backup file in the Backup Name field.

      The name must be 2 to 128 characters in length, and can contain only the following special characters: periods (.), underscores (_), hyphens (-), and colons (:). The name cannot start with auto, a special character, or a digit.

    • Auto Backup

      If Auto Backup is specified, you can select a backup policy from the drop-down list. You can also click Create Backup Policy and set the parameters to create an automatic backup policy. The following table describes the parameters.

      Parameter

      Description

      Policy Name

      The name of the custom policy.

      Backup Time

      The time at which you want to run a backup job.

      Backup Week

      One or more days on which you want to run backup jobs in a week.

      Retention Period

      The period of time for which backup files are retained in the source region.

      • Custom: You can specify a retention period. Valid values: 1 to 65536. Unit: days.

      • Always Keep: Backup files in the source region are stored permanently.

      Replication to Other Region

      If you enable the cross-region replication feature, the backup files that are created by the backup plan are automatically replicated to a specified destination region.

      • Backup files can be replicated between the China (Hong Kong) and Singapore (Singapore) regions.

      • If the ECS instance is infected with viruses or data is lost due to accidental deletion, you can use backup files in the source region or backup files replicated to the destination region to create an instance or a disk to restore data.

      Valid values:

      • Enabled

      • Not Enabled

      Destination Region

      You must specify a value for this parameter only if the Replication to Other Region parameter is set to Enabled. The destination region to which you want to replicate the backup files.

      Replicated Backup Point Retention Period

      You must specify a value for this parameter only if the Replication to Other Region parameter is set to Enabled. The period of time for which you want to retain the backup files that are replicated to the destination region.

      • Custom: You can specify a retention period. Valid values: 1 to 65536. Unit: days.

      • Always Keep: Backup files in the destination region are stored permanently.

  7. Click OK.

    After the backup policy is created, you can view the progress of the disk backup on the Protected Disk tab.

What to do next

Restore a disk