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 |
A snapshot is created and contains a full backup of data on a single disk or in a snapshot-consistent group at a specific point in time. If disk data is missing, you can use the 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. | |
An image is created and contains a full backup of the configurations, operating system, installed software, and data of an ECS instance. Note If you use custom images, you may be charged for snapshot storage and image licenses. For more information, see Images. | |
Use Cloud Backup to back up and restore data and implement disaster recovery | Cloud Backup, formerly known as Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR), supports the backup and restoration of a specific ECS file or ECS files in a specific directory, backup and restoration of ECS-hosted self-managed databases, and backup and restoration of 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 snapshot or a snapshot-consistent group to capture the point-in-time state of data blocks on a disk or disk group. You can use snapshots to restore data, build development and test environments, or create custom images for batch deployment of business. For more information about snapshots, see Overview.
Create a snapshot for data backup
The first backup is a full backup, and subsequent backups are incremental backups. Incremental backups can be quickly created and occupy a small amount of storage space. The amount of time required for backup varies based on the amount of incremental data to be backed up. For more information, see How snapshots work.
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 for a disk or Automatic snapshots.
Restore data from a snapshot
If data loss occurs due to reasons such as accidental operations or ransom viruses, you can use a snapshot to roll back the disk. This way, the disk reverts to the original 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 basic template that is used to create ECS instances. An image contains the operating system and preconfiguration data that are required to start and run instances.
Create an image for data backup
All image backups are full backups and can only be manually triggered. If you create an image from an ECS instance, the configurations, operating system, installed software, and data of the instance are backed up. 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 create ECS instances from the backup image that you created with the same data and operating system as the original image. For more information, see Use a custom image to create one or more 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 at the file or file directory level. For information about ECS file backup, see Overview.
ECS-hosted self-managed databases such as MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. For more information, see Overview (ECS database backup).
ECS instances. The backup and restoration of ECS instances are implemented based on snapshots. You can clone a snapshot to create ECS instances 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 the 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.