S3 Backup and Restores

VSHN offers a simple S3 backup solution which syncs all objects from a bucket or all buckets from an API user to a VSHN server where it’s then included in our standard BURP backup.

The Backup server is

  1. A VSHN shared customer server with a shared encrypted file systems; or

  2. A customer dedicated s3 backup VM.

Bucket Versioning

In addition to this backup, the customer should use S3 Bucket Versioning for single object restores, which has to be manually activated for each bucket. This is because S3 remote backups are mainly for disaster recovery or when for example a whole bucket was deleted by accident, etc.

Tools like cyberduck.io can be used to easily see the previous versions of objects. Of course old version can be managed via S3 API calls.

VSHN remote backup

The sync runs as a pre-backup job before the daily (after 22:00) backup. It iterates over all configured customer S3 buckets or API users and syncs alls objects / buckets to a local storage.

Retention

  • 7 daily backups

  • 4 weekly backups

Restore

For the customer shared solution there is no self-service for a customer to restore objects. Restores are done by VSHN. Please create a ticket in the VSHN Portal and tell us the bucket, which objects, and from which date to restore. We can restore back to the bucket or copy the objects as files to a server, a file share, etc.

Custom Options

The customer shared solution isn’t tuneable (backup frequency, retention, etc.) on a per customer basis. If you need this, a customer dedicated VM could make sense.

The only thing that’s configurable is which API users or buckets we backup. If you need this changed, please create a ticket.

Limitations

The customer has to provide a Access and Secret Key for an API user which has at least READ access to the whole bucket that should be backed up. If the customer changes the credentials, backups will fail until we correct the credentials.