Sunday, September 22, 2013

Automated Backups

Regularly Scheduled Backups to S3

Backing up your account to Amazon S3 has been a feature here for years.  Now, you can schedule automated backups, where your Rdbhost account is dumped to your S3 account on a regular basis.

You can arrange the backup to be done on a regular interval from 15 minutes to 7 days.  The backups are put in the S3 bucket you designate in your S3 config page, and are named with the date and time, as well as the account id.

Generally speaking, managing the dump files in your S3 account is your responsibility, manageable through Amazon's own management pages.  However, we do offer one tool to help.  After each backup, you can have Rdbhost prune the backup file collection, based on simple rules.

The first rule is a maximum age, where every backup over that age gets deleted.   The second rule is a percentage limit; each backup cannot be older than a given percentage of the next older backup.  For example, if your oldest backup is 10 months old and your configured percentage is 90%, the next oldest cannot be older than 9 months, and the one before that can only be 8 months, 3 days old, and so forth.

This pruning can help in keeping your S3 account from getting too large, too quickly.

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