This topic overviews the ECS Instance Backup feature, including its advantages, mechanics, procedures, and billing.
Introduction
ECS Instance Backup is a data management service from Cloud Backup built on disk snapshots. Cloud Backup provides fully automated ECS Instance Backup policies, intuitive backup and restore interfaces, and a wide range of restore, clone, and disaster recovery operations. It manages data at the instance level, not the disk level. This simplifies data protection for ECS instances and enables advanced use cases, such as setting up test and development environments and implementing low-cost geo-disaster recovery. These capabilities significantly enhance the value of your data protection.
Use cases
ECS instance backup and restore
Use automated backup policies and instance-level restores to recover an entire ECS instance. If the source ECS instance still exists, you can restore it in place. If the source ECS instance has been released, you can restore the data by cloning it to a new ECS instance.
Quickly set up test and development environments
Clone a new ECS instance from any recovery point of a production instance in minutes for testing and development.
Low-cost cross-zone and cross-region disaster recovery
Use the clone feature to create a new ECS instance in another zone. After you enable cross-region replication for instance backups, use any recovery point in a different region to quickly launch a new instance and resume your services.
Backup scope
An ECS instance backup includes only the data on the disks of the instance. It does not include data accessed through external mounts.
Key advantages
Instance-level protection
Manage backups at the instance level, not the disk level. This simplifies data protection for your entire instance. If the source ECS instance is accidentally released or its data is corrupted, you can restore it by cloning it from any backup.
Powerful and flexible backup policies
Cloud Backup offers global backup policies to add or remove protected ECS instances in batches. You can configure backups to run on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis and specify the retention period for each recovery point.
Intuitive restore interfaceA graphical interface lists your backups, letting you quickly view backup information or select a backup to restore or clone.
Versatile restore and clone operations
Local backups support both restore and clone operations. Launch instances from backups in a different region for disaster recovery. You can also perform an instant clone operation to create a new instance from the latest data in a short time.
Low-cost cross-zone and cross-region disaster recovery
Configure cross-region backup in a backup policy to quickly create a new ECS instance from any backup in a different region. This helps you resume services and meet disaster recovery needs.
Support for immutable backups
Enable the immutable backup feature in your backup policy to prevent accidental or malicious deletion of instance backup data. This provides an extra layer of security for your backup data.
How it works
ECS Instance Backup is built on snapshots, snapshot-consistent groups, and snapshot geo-replication to provide multi-dimensional protection for ECS instances, including backup and disaster recovery.
When you back up an ECS instance, Cloud Backup initiates a snapshot for each disk attached to the instance. Cloud Backup organizes this set of snapshots into a single recovery point for the entire ECS instance. These snapshots are visible in the snapshot console. If all disks of the ECS instance are Enhanced SSDs (ESSDs), they are grouped into a snapshot-consistent group to ensure instance-level consistency. For non-ESSD disks, Cloud Backup creates a snapshot for each disk at the same time. However, the exact time of each snapshot may vary slightly, and consistency across all disks is not guaranteed.
By orchestrating features such as snapshot lifecycle management, snapshot geo-replication, snapshot rollback, and disk creation, Cloud Backup delivers advanced capabilities for ECS instances, including backup, restore, cloning, and geo-disaster recovery. This provides a new level of data management for your ECS instances.
Procedure
The following procedure shows how to back up ECS instances in the Cloud Backup console.
ECS instance backup is a backup orchestration service provided by Cloud Backup based on the disk snapshot capability. The first time you back up ECS instances, you must activate the snapshot service.
You are not charged for activating Cloud Backup. You are charged for the Cloud Backup clients that you use to back up ECS instances. The fees for the storage usage of ECS snapshots are included into your snapshot service bills. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items.
When you create a backup job for ECS instances, specify the backup mode, the retention period of backup data, and whether to enable the cross-region replication feature. You can enable the application-consistent backup feature.
NoteIf the region that you select supports backup policies, you can set a backup plan only by associating it with a backup policy. Cloud Backup periodically backs up ECS instances based on the backup policy.
To view the regions that support backup policies, click Policy Center in the left-side navigation pane of the Cloud Backup console. For more information about how to create a backup policy, see Create a backup policy.
After you create a backup plan, the first backup job performs a full backup and subsequent backup jobs perform incremental backups.
Restore or clone an ECS instance or disk
If an exception occurs on an ECS instance or disk, you can restore the ECS instance, clone the ECS instance, restore a disk, or clone a disk based on backup points and the time when the backup points are generated.
ImportantIf you clone an ECS instance or a disk, you are charged based on the billing methods and billable items of ECS. For more information, see Billable items and billing methods of ECS.
Billing
ECS Instance Backup is a backup orchestration service from Cloud Backup that uses ECS Snapshot capabilities. You need to purchase a resource plan based on the number of ECS instances that you want to back up. The fees consist of the following two items:
Cloud Backup clients for ECS instance backup: You are charged for the number of ECS instances to which a backup policy is applied. For more information, see Pricing of Cloud Backup.
Snapshots: The ECS service charges for snapshot fees generated by ECS Instance Backup. Cloud Backup does not provide specific information about snapshot fees.
ImportantIf your service is suspended for more than 15 days due to an overdue payment, all ECS Instance Backup recovery points, disk backup points, and their associated snapshots in your account and the accounts managed by you are automatically deleted. The data cannot be recovered after it is deleted. To prevent backup data loss, renew your service promptly. If a snapshot is used to create a disk or an image, the snapshot is not deleted. Cloud Backup just stops managing the snapshot.
For detailed information about snapshot fees, contact ECS technical support. This includes the storage capacity consumed by snapshots created during ECS backups and the cross-region traffic fees generated after you enable cross-region replication. For more information, see Snapshot pricing and Snapshot billing.
ImportantObject Storage Service (OSS) resource plans can be used to offset only the snapshot capacity fees, not the cross-region traffic fees.
Next steps
Learn about the Best practices for Cloud Backup.