GitHub user JoaoJandre added a comment to the discussion: Instance backups
Great, CloudStack already has the built-in solution for VM's volume backups. If you want to backup your VMs volumes, you need to set `snapshot.backup.to.secondary` and create volume snapshots for the volumes you want backed up. For backups, VM snapshots will not do as they are not saved to a different storage area, but volume snapshots can be (depending on `snapshot.backup.to.secondary`). As you and @rajujith think that snapshots are not backups, let me explain: According to IBM: "Backup and restore refers to technologies and practices for making periodic copies of data and applications to a separate, secondary device and then using those copies to recover the data and applications." [^ibm] So how do we apply this on CloudStack? Your VM's volumes are always on the primary storage. When you create a snapshot, you copy all the volume's data to a secondary storage area (assuming `snapshot.backup.to.secondary` is true), which should be separated from your primary storage. Where it is located is up to you and your infrastructure, meaning you could create a secondary storage that is on another datacenter if you want, and store all your snapshots there. And when you need to, you can restore your volume using the snapshot via ACS. Furthermore, depending on how you want to set it up, using secondary storage selectors (see #7659), you could have a single secondary storage that contains all of your volume snapshots (your backups) in a separate datacenter, and keep your templates/ISOs in a secondary storage that is inside the 'main' datacenter, so that the files you use frequently (templates/ISOs) are faster to access, while the backups (volume snapshots) are on another storage in case of a disaster on your 'main' datacenter. Moreover, as @rajujith said, #7873 added the possibility of keeping redundant copies of your snapshots on various secondary storages, giving you even more safety. As for the periodic part, you can create snapshot policies, that will take periodic snapshots of your volumes. I hope you can see how volume snapshots are backups, at least using the `snapshot.backup.to.secondary` configuration. [^ibm]: https://www.ibm.com/topics/backup-and-restore GitHub link: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/discussions/9347#discussioncomment-9986579 ---- This is an automatically sent email for users@cloudstack.apache.org. To unsubscribe, please send an email to: users-unsubscr...@cloudstack.apache.org
