Disaster recovery solutions are designed to ensure business continuity if a disaster occurs. To help enterprises ensure stable business operations, normal functioning of IT systems, and data security, the disaster recovery solutions become increasingly important and are rapidly evolving. Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances allow you to use snapshots, images, Cloud Backup, or a high-availability architecture to back up and restore data and applications to improve business availability and continuity.
Use scenarios of disaster recovery solutions
Solution | Scenario |
You can create a snapshot for a disk or a snapshot-consistent group for a set of disks to create a point-in-time backup of disk data. If disk data is missing, you can use a snapshot to restore the data to the state when the snapshot was created. Note If you use ECS snapshots, you are charged for snapshot storage. For more information, see Snapshots. | |
You can create an image from an ECS instance. The image is a full backup of the ECS instance and contains the configurations, operating system, installed software, and data of the instance. Note
For more information, see Images. | |
Use the async replication feature to implement disaster recovery and restore data | You can use the async replication and replication pair-consistent group features to implement disaster recovery and restore data for disks across regions or across zones within the same region. Note You are charged for the asynchronous replication bandwidth based on the subscription billing method or the amount of replicated data based on the pay-as-you-go billing method. |
When you troubleshoot disks, data disk partitions may be lost. You can use tools, such as fdisk, to restore the partitions and the data. For more information, see Introduction to tools for restoring data on Linux instances and What do I do if I cannot view data disks on a Windows ECS instance?. | |
Use Cloud Backup to back up and restore data and implement disaster recovery | You can use Cloud Backup to backup and restore individual ECS files or directories, self-managed databases that are hosted on ECS instances, and ECS instances based on snapshots. Cloud Backup also supports cross-region and cross-zone disaster recovery by using the async replication feature. Note You are charged when you perform backup operations in the Cloud Backup console. For more information, see Billing methods and billable items. |
Use a snapshot to back up and restore data
The ECS Snapshot service is an agentless backup service that allows you to create a full backup of a disk or a disk set to capture the point-in-time state of data blocks on the disk or disk set. You can use snapshots to restore data. For more information, see Snapshot overview.
Create a snapshot for data backup
You can manually create a snapshot or create an automatic snapshot policy for the system disk and data disks. For more information, see Create a snapshot or Automatic snapshots.
Restore data from a snapshot
If data loss occurs on a disk due to reasons, such as accidental operations or ransom viruses, you can use a snapshot of the disk to roll back the disk. This way, the disk is restored to the state when the snapshot was created. For more information, see Roll back a disk by using a snapshot.
Use an image to back up and restore data
An image is a template that is used to create ECS instances. An image contains an operating system, application data, pre-installed software, and preconfigured data. You can create a custom image from an ECS instance to back up instance data. After the custom image is created, you can use the custom image to quickly create ECS instances that have the same operating system and data environments as the backed up ECS instance. This way, you can restore the data of the backed up ECS instance.
Create an image for data backup
When you create an image from an ECS instance, the image is a full backup of the instance and contains the operating system, all configurations, installed software, and data of the instance. For more information, see Create a custom image from an instance or Create a custom image from a snapshot.
Restore data from an image
You can use an image that is created from an ECS instances to create an ECS instance that has the same operating system, applications, and data as the original ECS instance to restore instance data. For more information, see Create an instance by using a custom image or Create an ECS instance by using a community image.
Use the async replication feature to implement disaster recovery and restore data
The async replication and replication pair-consistent group features protect data across regions or zones within the same region based on the data replication capability of Elastic Block Storage (EBS). If a primary site fails, you can fail over to the corresponding secondary site. If the primary site recovers, you can restore data from the secondary site. This way, you can protect data and improve business continuity.
Restore data when data disk partitions are lost
When you troubleshoot disks, data disk partitions may be lost.
For Linux ECS instances, you can use tools, such as fdisk, to restore the partitions and the data. For more information, see Best practices for restoring data on Linux instances.
For Windows ECS instances, you can use the built-in Disk Management utility in Windows and specific commercial software to restore data. For more information, see Restore data in a Windows instance. For more information, see Best practices for restoring data on Windows instances.
Use Cloud Backup to back up and restore data and implement disaster recovery
As a centralized disaster recovery platform of Alibaba Cloud, Cloud Backup is an easy-to-use data management service that is deployed on the public cloud to provide high agility, efficiency, security, and reliability. Cloud Backup supports backup and restoration of the following ECS objects:
ECS files or directories. For information about ECS file backup, see Overview.
Self-managed databases that are hosted on ECS instances, such as MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. For more information, see Overview (ECS database backup).
ECS instances. ECS instances are backed up and restored based on snapshots. You can clone a ECS instance to quickly build development and test environments. For more information, see Overview.
Cloud Backup provides a cross-region and cross-zone disaster recovery solution for ECS by using the async replication feature. The solution provides multi-instance consistency and cross-instance orchestration capabilities and allows you to quickly implement application-level failover and fault recovery to ensure business continuity. For more information, see Overview.
Use a high-availability architecture to implement disaster recovery and data restoration for applications
If you deployed databases and applications on an ECS instance, you can switch the single-instance deployment to the multi-instance deployment that uses a single-zone or multi-zone high-availability architecture to implement disaster recovery and data restoration for applications. If one ECS instance fails or is overloaded, other ECS instances can be used to ensure business continuity and availability. For more information, see Deploy a highly available architecture.