Backup ECS Instances
To create an Huawei Cloud ECS instance backup job, you can get started from the Cloud Backup > Backup page. Please follow the below steps to complete the New Backup Job wizard for Huawei Cloud ECS instances.
Step 1. Select Instances to Backup
Select instances to be backed up from the Select backup object 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 Huawei 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 prefix 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 Node dropdown list, you can select a backup node on which you want the backup data to be processed and stored.
In the Target Storage dropdown list, the storages which belong to the selected backup node can be selected.
When done selecting the backup storage, 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 Strategy 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 or a Once-off Backup job.
For a 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 a scheduled backup job, you can schedule full backup only, full with incremental combination and full with differential combination backup methods. The recommended backup strategy is full with incremental combination.
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.
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.
Data Storage Policy includs Deduplication, Compression Compression Level 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. With different compression level, the backup jobs will have different compression efficiency, the higher the level, the more system resources will be needed.
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 ECS instance restore job, password verification is required to perform ECS instance restore.
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.
Advanced Strategy contains some advanced options for the ECS instance backup job.
Standard Snapshot can be configured if the backup job includes multiple Instances, and it can be configured as Serial or Parallel. If serial, the snapshots will be taken one by one. If parallel, the snapshot requests will be simultaneously sent to the cloud platform.
Pre-create Snapshot can be enabled to create the next instance’s volume snapshot while the previous instance is being transferred to the backup storage.
By specifying the number of Transfer Threads, you can enable multithreaded transmission to improve the processing speed of the backup job. The default value for multithreaded transmission is 3, even if you can set the value from 1 to 8, but usually 3 threads will be enough.
BitDetector can be enabled to exclude the swap file blocks, deleted file blocks and the unpartitioned spaces of the ECS instances from the backup job.
Transmission Strategy
Proxy Instance Type is used to perform data transfer within Huawei Cloud ECS instances during backup. Different instance types have different resources (CPU/memory size), so the charges will be different. Users can choose the type of instance to do the backup and restore.
Transfer Agent Bind Public IP can be enabled if there is prepaid public IP, users can specify that the proxy use this IP to reduce costs associated with large data transfer. If specified IP is unavailable, a seprate one will be created.
Payment Method includes pricying by bandwidth and pricying by traffic. Pricying is based on bandwith with a maximum limit of 2000M.
Bandwith size if it's higher, the charge will higher, user needs to be configured on demand.
Encrypted Transfer will use SSL encryption for the transmission channel in network transmission process.
Advanced Strategy
Block Size is used to when running the backup jobs, Vinchin Backup Server will perform deduplication and compression to the backup data per the defined block size.
Retain Snapshot can be enabled. If enable this option, a snapshot will be retained. It's used for rapid recovery.
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 ECS 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.