Overview
Enterprises often need to retain long-term backup data for business continuity, compliance, customer contracts, and e-Discovery. Storage optimization is an ongoing process of evaluating your data storage needs and choosing a cost-effective AWS storage option that meets business needs.
EBS Snapshots Archive is a low-cost storage tier that allows you to archive rarely accessed snapshots, saving up to 75% in storage costs. EBS Snapshots Archive is integrated with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to provide an automated way to back up and archive data stored on EBS volumes.
You can transition your rarely accessed snapshots to EBS Snapshots Archive, significantly reducing costs while retaining long-term availability. Archived snapshots will have a minimum retention period of 90 days, with options to retrieve archived snapshots within 24-48 hours. Once retrieved, a snapshot can be used to recover an EBS Volume.
Key Advantages
Archiving EBS snapshots offers the following benefits:
Cost-effective storage: Transition snapshots to lower-cost storage tiers to achieve up to 75% storage cost savings.
Snapshot retrieval: Seamless retrieval of EBS snapshots, ensuring data availability.
Cold storage: Archive EBS snapshots as part of long-term retention.
Manual EBS Snapshot Archive
You can archive full, point-in-time copies of snapshots that need to be retained for months or years that do not require frequent or fast retrievals.
To manually archive your EBS snapshots:
Log into your Druva CloudRanger console and navigate to Resources > EBS. Select the Backups tab.
Select the snapshot that you would like to archive and then click Vertical three dots.
Select Archive to > EBS Snapshot Archive from the drop-down menu.Verify that the appropriate snapshot(s) have been selected for archival. Click Archive.
Click View to navigate to the Jobs page to view the status of the archival job.
💡 Tip
Once the snapshot archive is complete, the Location of the archived snapshot moves from EBS Snapshot to EBS Snapshot Archive.
📝 Note
Once archived, a full copy of the snapshot is created within the 'archive' tier and the existing snapshot in the standard tier is deleted. However, any policy-based retention remains active.
Snapshots once archived will not be available as part of the regular operations including creating volumes or copying to other regions or accounts.
Fast snapshot Restore (FSR) is automatically disabled for the snapshots that have been archived.
Policy-Based Archival of EBS Snapshots
You can choose to automate your EBS Snapshots Archive process with policy-level archival:
Log into the Druva CloudRanger console and navigate to Policies.
Click Create to create a new backup policy or select an existing policy to edit.
On the Retention tab, select the Archive checkbox and specify the archive options.
Select the retention period and the storage class to which the backup is to be transitioned.
For example: Move weekly, monthly, and yearly data to EBS Snapshot Archive after 3 weeks.
📝 Note
The options to select your Druva CloudRanger Account and AWS Region to archive the backups will remain disabled when you select EBS Snapshots Archive.Click Save & Continue.
Specify the Resources and backup encryption that apply to the policy.
Once active, the backup policy is automatically executed within the defined schedule, or you may choose to execute your policy on-demand.
📝 Note
Once the backup is archived, Druva CloudRanger deletes the original snapshot. However, any policy-based retention remains active.
Snapshot Retrieve
Snapshot retrieve allows you to access the original snapshot. Once your snapshot is retrieved from the archive tier to the standard tier, you can use it for creating volumes.
The following retrieve types are supported:
Temporary: Retrieve your snapshots from the archive tier for a limited period of time (for example, 5 days).
Permanent: Retrieve archived snapshots to permanently move them to the standard tier.
To retrieve archived snapshots back to standard tier:
Log into the Druva CloudRanger console and navigate to Resources > EBS. Select the Backups tab.
Select the snapshot that you would like to retrieve from archive and then click Vertical three dots.
To retrieve a snapshot for a specific period of time, select Retrieve from storage > Temporarily from the drop-down menu. You can specify the number of days for which you wish to retain access to the snapshot. Click Continue.
To permanently move the archived snapshot to the standard tier, select Retrieve from storage > Permanently from the drop-down menu. On the confirmation dialog, click Complete.
💡 Tip
Use the Location criteria to filter snapshots in the archived state. Once retrieved, the location of the archived snapshot moves from EBS Snapshot Archive to EBS Snapshot.
📝 Note
The availability of this feature may be limited based on the license type, region, and other criteria. To access this feature, contact your Account Manager or Support.