Backup EC2 Instances

To create an AWS EC2 instance backup job, you can get started from the Backup > Public Cloud page. Please follow the below steps to complete the New Backup Job wizard for AWS EC2 instances.

Step 1. Select Instances to Backup

Select instances to be backed up from the Select backup objects column, you can view from different regions to locate the target instances. The selected backup object(s) will be listed in the Selected Instance(s) column.

If there’re instances not showing, please click on Sync button to update and sync the instance list to Vinchin backup server.

By default, all volumes of the selected instances will be all backed up, if you wish to exclude certain volumes of certain instances from backing up, please click on the instance, all the volumes of the instance will be shown. By either selecting the volume or not, you can choose to include or exclude the volume from backing up.

If you want the newly added instances to be automatically backed up by Vinchin, you can enable Auto Join Backup. By selecting the entire AWS cloud platform, or entire region, any newly added or removed instance within the selected object will be automatically included or excluded from the backup jobs.

As supplementary to the Auto Join Backup, Instance Filter can be used to backup only specific instances or to exclude specific instances from the backup job with the user defined name keyword if needed.

When done selecting the target instances to be backed up, please click on Next to continue.

Notice

You can only add instances from the same cloud platform into a same job, if you have multiple cloud platforms, please create new jobs for the other cloud platforms separately.

Step 2. Select Backup Destination

A backup destination (backup storage) should be associated with this backup job.

In the Target Storage, all storage device are listed here, you can choose storage device on which you want the backup data to be stored.

In the Target Node , when you choose the storage device, the corresponding computing resources will be automatically associated and displayed.

When done selecting the backup destination, please click on Next to continue.

Step 3. Configure Backup Strategies

General Strategy

Under the General Strategy tab, you can setup the backup Time Schedule, Throttling Policy, Data Storage Policy, Retention Policy and some other advanced options.

In the Select Policy dropdown list, you can select a preconfigured strategy template, if you had created strategy templates, otherwise choose Customized Policy. For how to create strategy templates, please refer to Strategy Templates.

To determine the backup window of this job, the Time Windows indicator can be a reference for you to determine in which time window the job should be scheduled.

In the Mode dropdown list, you can choose to setup a Backup as Scheduled job, an Once-off Backup job or an On Demand job.

For a scheduled backup job, you can schedule full backup only, full with incremental combination, full with differential combination backup methods or only forever incremental. The recommended backup strategy is full with incremental combination.

For an once-off backup job, the job will only run for once, and only full backup will be performed. You only have to appoint a time of when to start the backup job in the Start Time field.

For an on demand job, you can start running the job whenever you want manually.

Vinchin backup server will suggest a time to start the backup job, please change the start time as per your requirements. When the start time of a full backup is overlapped with an incremental backup, full backup will be taken at first priority, and the incremental backup will be taken on the next scheduled start time.

If you want to customize the schedules according to your requirements, you can click on the + icon to expand and customize the settings for either full backups or incremental backups.

For example, you can schedule full backups twice a month without repeating.

Then configure several incremental backups each day, by default incremental backup will run only for once each day, to run incremental backups several times a day, you can enable the Repeat option.

Notice

1. It is recommended to schedule backup jobs during off-peak hours in the evening or early morning.
2. Forever incremental backups are not supported when the backup destination is tape or cloud storage.

After configuring the time schedules of the backups, next you can configure the Throttling Policy, the throttling policy settings are optional, only if the backup jobs will bring network or I/O overload to your production environment, you can configure the throttling policy accordingly otherwise leave it unconfigured.

Notice When multiple throttling policies exist within the same time period, the transmission speed is restricted to the minimum value among all throttling policies.

Data Storage Policy including Deduplication, Compression and Encryption of the backup data.

By enabling Data Deduplication and Data Compression, you can save the bandwidth and storage resources for transmitting and storing the backup data.

By enabling Data Encryption, the backup data will be encrypted and then stored into the backup storage. A password needs to be specified to secure the data encryption, when creating a EC2 instance restore job, password verification is required.

Notice

1. Higher compression levels result in greater data compression rates, but also require longer backup times.
2. After configuring a custom encryption password, keep the password associated with the backup job secure. If the encryption password is forgotten, the backup data cannot be restored.

Retention Policy can be used to define how long the backup data to be reserved in the backup storage, you can either define the retention policy by Restore Points or Backup Chains type, and retain with Number of Restore Points or Number of Days. Additionally, you can activate the advanced GFS Retention for your instance backups to apply long-term retention policy of some specific full restore points. For more information of how Vinchin's retention policy works, please refer to Retention Policy.

Transmission Strategy

Proxy Instance Type Supports network transmission only, transferring backup data via the transmission proxy.

Encrypted Transfer will use SSL encryption for the transmission channel in network transmission process.

Transfer Threads Supports configuring multiple threads for backup data transfer. The default is 3 threads, with a maximum configurable limit of 8 threads. Using multiple threads for data transfer significantly accelerates backup speed by fully utilizing network resources.

Notice

1. To prevent excessive network resource consumption, configure the number of transfer threads in conjunction with a Throttling Policy.
2. The total number of threads running simultaneously must not exceed the logical core count of the backup system host machine. Any excess threads will not further enhance transfer speed.

Security Strategy

WORM Protection: Once enabled for a backup point, WORM (Write Once Read Many) data cannot be modified or deleted before its expiration date, and its retention period can only be extended. The default protection period is 7 days, with a configurable range of 1 to 9999 days.

Notice

1. Enabling WORM protection requires that the WORM functionality for the corresponding backup storage be activated.
2. If forever incremental enable, WORM protection is not supported.

By enabling Malware Scan, backup data will undergo virus detection. After a backup job completes successfully, a verification job will be automatically generated to perform virus scanning according to the configured policy.

Enabling malware Scan allows configuration of scan threads and scan target.

By enabling Integrity Check, before executing an incremental backup or differential backup, the dependency points for this backup undergo integrity verification.

For incremental backups, verification is performed on the dependent full backup points and incremental backup points.

For differential backups, verification is performed on the dependent full backup points.

Advanced Strategy

In Snapshot Mode, you can choose between Serial Snapshot or Parallel Snapshot, with Serial Snapshot as the default.

Serial Snapshot is suitable for general scenarios,a single job backing up multiple instances will sequentially create snapshots for each instance in the job and then transfer the data, which reduces resource consumption on the production side.

When parallel snapshots are selected, a job backing up multiple instances creates snapshots for all instances simultaneously before sequentially transferring data. This ensures consistency among multiple instances within the same job, making it suitable for scenarios where business operations overlap across instances and data consistency must be guaranteed. However, it consumes some production resources and requires substantial storage space on the production side.

BitDetector is a Vinchin unique feature which can further reduce the backup size by excluding some special data.

Retry Strategy can improve the fault tolerance of the system and increased the probability of ultimate success.

Storages can set data Block Size, Data File Shards Size and Merge Redundant Data Proportion.

Overload Protection, you can enable Ignore Node Resource Limits to bypass the node's resource limitations.

Step 4. Review and Confirm Job Settings

After completing the above-mentioned settings, you can review and confirm the settings in one screen.

A job name can be specified for identification of the EC2 instance backup job, and by clicking on the Submit button to confirm the settings and create the backup job.

After creating a new backup job, you can find it on the Monitor Center > Jobs page, under the Current Job tab.