How to backup and restore Alibaba Cloud ECS?

1. Basic concepts

Alibaba Cloud ECS instance cloud disk

The cloud disks of Alibaba Cloud ECS instances provide block-level data storage, and adopt a three-copy distributed mechanism to provide data reliability guarantee for ECS instances. ECS cloud disks can be used alone or in combination to meet the needs of different application scenarios.

There are three types of ECS cloud disks: ordinary cloud disks, high-efficiency cloud disks, and SSD cloud disks.

Ordinary cloud disk: use mechanical disk as storage medium

Product features: Provides hundreds of random read and write IOPS capabilities, with a maximum throughput of 30 ~ 40 MB/s; a single ordinary cloud disk provides a maximum storage space of 2000 GB; it can be independently mounted to any ECS instance in the same availability zone .

Scenarios: suitable for data infrequently accessed, low cost, low I/O load, or application scenarios with random read and write I/O.

High-efficiency cloud disk: using a mixed medium of solid-state hard disk and mechanical hard disk as the storage medium

Product features: Provides up to 3000 random read and write IOPS and 80 MBps throughput performance; a single high-efficiency cloud disk provides a maximum storage space of 32768 GB; it can be independently mounted to any ECS instance in the same availability zone.

Application scenarios: Small and medium-sized relational databases such as MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, or medium and large-scale development and testing applications that require high data reliability and moderate performance requirements.
SSD cloud disk:

Product features: It provides a maximum of 20,000 random read and write IOPS and a throughput of 256 MB/s; a single SSD cloud disk provides a maximum storage space of 32,768 GB; it can be independently mounted to any ECS instance in the same availability zone.

Application scenarios: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and other medium-to-large relational database applications or medium-to-large development and test environments with high data reliability requirements.
Note: Expected IOPS performance can only be obtained when attached to an I/O-optimized instance. Expected IOPS performance cannot be obtained when attaching to a non-I/O-optimized instance.

2. Alibaba Cloud ECS instance snapshot

Alibaba Cloud ECS products provide a snapshot function. The so-called snapshot is to save the system data status at a certain point in time. The snapshot of the data disk is used for data backup, and the snapshot of the system disk is used for making a mirror image. Snapshots use incremental methods, and only the data changes between two snapshots will be copied.

For daily backup of system disks and data disks, users can use snapshots to regularly back up important business data to deal with data loss risks caused by misoperations, attacks, and viruses.

Before replacing the operating system, upgrading application software, or migrating business data, users can create one or more data snapshots. Once any problems occur during the upgrade or migration process, the data snapshot can be used to restore the normal system data status in time.

For the multi-copy application of production data, users can create snapshots of production data to provide near real-time real production data for applications such as data mining, report query, development and testing.

When creating a snapshot, the status of the server can only be "Running" or "Stopped". Snapshots of Alibaba Cloud ECS instances provide two modes:

For automatic snapshots, users can customize parameters such as snapshot creation time, repetition time, and retention time by creating an automatic snapshot policy, and the Alibaba Cloud system will automatically create snapshots for the specified disk on a regular basis.

Manual snapshot, users create disk snapshots according to their needs. However, manually created snapshots will not be actively deleted and will be kept forever.

3. Alibaba Cloud ECS instance image

An image is a template for the running environment of an ECS instance, generally including an operating system and pre-installed software. You can use the image to create a new ECS instance and replace the system disk of an ECS instance. Currently, Ali provides four available image types:

Public image: officially provided by Alibaba Cloud, currently supports multiple distribution versions such as Windows and Linux;

Mirror market: buy mirrors provided by third parties (ISVs) through the mirror market;

Custom image: a custom image created using an existing server ECS instance;

Shared image: select the one shared by other Alibaba Cloud users