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Cloud Backup:Overview

Last Updated:Feb 05, 2024

Cloud Backup provides the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) disaster recovery feature based on continuous data replication (CDR). The feature integrates on-premises backup of enterprise applications and cloud disaster recovery for data centers. You can use the feature to implement disaster recovery for applications deployed in on-premises data centers and Alibaba Cloud. The recovery point objective (RPO) can be as low as a few seconds and the recovery time objective (RTO) can be as low as a few minutes. The feature helps you effectively ensure data security and business continuity.

Scenarios

ECS disaster recovery can be used across regions and zones in the following two scenarios:

  • Cross-region disaster recovery

    The disaster recovery system is deployed in two regions of Alibaba Cloud. If a fault occurs at the production site due to natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes, the business system is switched to the disaster recovery site. ECS disaster recovery provides a highly reliable disaster recovery solution by deploying the production and disaster recovery sites in different regions. To ensure business continuity, the feature allows you to achieve an RPO of 1 minute and an RTO of 15 minutes. The feature helps you effectively prevent system failures that are caused by regional disasters. For more information, see Cross-region disaster recovery.

  • Cross-zone disaster recovery

    If a production site encounters force majeure events such as a fire or power outage, or equipment failures such as a software or hardware failure, your application may fail to run for a short period of time. To ensure business continuity, you can use the ECS disaster recovery feature to back up the application across zones. This prevents faults that may occur in a single zone and meets the RPO and RTO goals of your business. For more information, see Cross-zone disaster recovery.

Capabilities

ECS disaster recovery provides the following capabilities:

  • Application data replication in real time: ECS disaster recovery can monitor data changes in disks of operating systems and ECS instances, capture changed data, and then synchronize such data to disaster recovery sites in real time. In this way, it provides real-time protection for your data with a second-level or minute-level RPO.

  • Quick application running in another region or zone: You can quickly run applications in another region or zone within minutes.

  • Disaster recovery drills without business interruption: You can perform disaster recovery drills on application servers deployed on the cloud at any time to verify that the business can be recovered. Disaster recovery drills do not affect the source production environment or interrupt data replication.

Benefits

ECS disaster recovery has the following benefits:

  • Cost-effective: ECS disaster recovery consumes only disk resources and a small number of computing resources. It only requires software authorization such as authorization from operating and application systems during disaster recovery.

  • Easy to use: You can start data replication for disaster recovery, perform disaster recovery drills, and restore data in one click without deploying a disaster recovery center.

  • Highly reliable: ECS disaster recovery can guarantee continuous data replication and resumable upload even when errors occur, for example, the source server is overloaded or restarted, the disaster recovery gateway is restarted upon power-off, or the data replication link encounters network jitter. Alibaba Cloud guarantees the reliability of cloud data.

  • Highly secure: ECS disaster recovery uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit algorithm and HTTPS to encrypt your data and guarantee end-to-end security.

  • Verifiable: You can perform disaster recovery drills on cloud systems at any time without affecting the production system. This overcomes the difficulties in verifying the disaster recovery system.

Billing

If you use the async replication feature for disaster recovery, the following fees are incurred:

  • The fees for using the ECS disaster recovery software

    The fees for using the ECS disaster recovery software are included in your Cloud Backup bills. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go.

  • Cross-region replication traffic fee

    You are charged for the cross-region replication traffic generated by cross-region disaster recovery on the cloud. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go.

  • The fees for using the pay-as-you-go ECS instances and disks created at the disaster recovery site are included in your ECS bills. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go.

Other ECS disaster recovery technologies

Cloud Backup provides ECS disaster recovery based on async replication of disks. For more information, see Overview of ECS disaster recovery (async replication in public preview).