Yandex Cloud Backup overview
Yandex Cloud Backup is a service for creating backups and restoring resources and their data.
Resources
With Cloud Backup, you can create backups for the following types of resources:
- Yandex Compute Cloud VM instances.
- Yandex BareMetal servers.
- VMs and servers in the third-party provider infrastructure.
- VMs and servers in the user on-premise infrastructure.
Note
You cannot restore a VM backup to a server or a server backup to a VM. However, you can restore an external server backup to a Yandex BareMetal server.
Resource backups
Resource backups are application-consistent: they save not only the data on disks but also the data already submitted but not yet fully written to the disk. This allows you to resume applications that were running at the time of the backup directly after recovering a resource from the backup. This is important for VMs and servers forming a part of data storage systems, such as when a DBMS is running on the resource.
Cloud Backup can create full and incremental backups. A full backup stores the whole resource data: the recovery is faster than from an incremental backup, yet such backups take up more storage space and take longer to create. An incremental backup only stores data that is different from the previous backup. It is faster to create and takes up less space. However, recovery from an incremental backup takes longer than from a full one. If you know your resource has changed a lot since the previous backup, it is better to take a full backup.
Note
If you are using a policy with the fastBackupEnabled option and have run an antivirus scan prior to creating an incremental backup, the backup time may increase significantly. Read more in Interaction with an antivirus.
With Cloud Backup, you can also restore individual files and directories from a backup to any Compute Cloud VM or BareMetal server connected to the service. For more information, see File-by-file recovery. File-by-file recovery to resources residing in your on-premise or third-party infrastructure is currently not available.
To enable backups for a resource, you first need to have it connected and configured. For more information, see Connecting resources you need to back up to Cloud Backup.
Note
When creating a backup, make sure the resource you want to back up is running.
Once you have connected your resource to Cloud Backup and configured it, you also need to link the resource to a backup policy, i.e., a Cloud Backup resource. The policy includes settings for creating and storing backups. You can link your resources to default policies or create custom policies.
Cloud Backup automatically supplies the metrics on the number of backed up resources and storage space used for backups to Yandex Monitoring.
The service has two types of restrictions: quotas and limits.
Comparison with VM disk snapshots in Compute Cloud
| Disk snapshots in Compute Cloud | Cloud Backup | |
|---|---|---|
| Granularity | Disk | VMs with all disks Individual files and folders VM applications (coming soon). |
| Disk types | All types except local disks on dedicated hosts. The snapshot creation time is not fixed for non-replicated disks and SSD-IO. |
All disk types |
| LVM | Not supported | Supported |
| Recovery | Full recovery to a new VM only. | To a new or existing VM. Partial recovery of individual files. |
| Consistency | Atomic snapshot of each disk. | Atomic snapshot of the entire VM, individual folders, or files. |
| Backup integrity checks | Not supported | Supported |
| Agent installation | Not required | Required, installed automatically when connecting a VM to the service. |
| Optimization | Full backups only. Data compression is not supported. |
Full or incremental backups. Multiple data compression levels with an option to opt out. |
| Pricing | Per GB of stored backups. | Per GB of stored backups and VM connection fee. |
| Required VM status | You can create a snapshot on both stopped or running VMs. | You can only create a snapshot on a running VM with the Cloud Backup agent installed. |
Service activation and backup provider
Cloud Backup is enabled by a backup provider. Currently, the service only has one provider available: Cyberprotect.
For correct operation, the Cloud Backup agent installed on a resource sends the following service metadata on the resource configuration to the provider's servers:
- VM or server name.
- OS name and version.
- OS kernel version.
- VM or server internal IP address.
- MAC address of each server network adapter or VM network interface.
- Amount of RAM.
- CPU model and frequency.
- CPU type, physical or virtual.
- Type of virtualization: hardware or software VM virtualization.
- Names of mount points and disks connected to the VM or server.
Warning
The data stored on the user's Compute Cloud VMs or BareMetal servers, same as its backups, never leave Yandex Cloud.
To get started, you need to activate the service, i.e., to connect to a backup provider. You can activate the service directly or connect your first resource to Cloud Backup, which activates the service automatically.
To activate the service, you need at least the backup.user role for the folder in which you want to create backups of target resources.
After activation, the system automatically creates the following backup policies:
Default daily: Daily incremental backup with the last 15 backups retained.Default weekly: Weekly incremental backup with the last 15 backups retained.Default monthly: Monthly incremental backup with the last 15 backups retained.