Working with Amazon FSx for OpenZFS built-in backups - FSx for OpenZFS
Working with automatic daily backupsWorking with user-initiated backups

Working with Amazon FSx for OpenZFS built-in backups

With FSx for OpenZFS, backups are file-system-consistent, highly durable, and incremental. To ensure high durability, Amazon FSx stores backups in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon FSx backups are incremental, whether they are generated using the automatic daily backup or the user-initiated backup feature. This means that only the data on the file system that has changed after your most recent backup is saved. This minimizes the time required to create the backup and saves on storage costs by not duplicating data. When you delete a backup, only the data unique to that backup is removed. Each FSx for OpenZFS backup contains all of the information that is needed to create a new file system from the backup, effectively restoring a point-in-time snapshot of the file system.

Creating regular backups for your file system is a best practice that complements the replication that FSx for OpenZFS performs for your file system. Amazon FSx backups help support your backup retention and compliance needs. Working with Amazon FSx backups is easy, whether it's creating backups, copying a backup, restoring a file system from a backup, or deleting a backup.

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Working with automatic daily backups

By default, Amazon FSx takes an automatic daily backup of your file system. These automatic daily backups occur during the daily backup window that was established when you created the file system. At some point during the daily backup window, storage I/O might be suspended briefly while the backup process initializes (typically for less than a few seconds). When you choose your daily backup window, we recommend that you choose a convenient time of the day. This time ideally is outside of the normal operating hours for the applications that use the file system.

Automatic daily backups are kept for a certain period of time, known as a retention period. When you create a file system in the Amazon FSx console, the default automatic daily backup retention period is 30 days. The default retention period is different in the Amazon FSx API and CLI. You can set the retention period to be between 1–90 days. Automatic daily backups are deleted when the file system is deleted.

Note

While automatic daily backups have a maximum retention period of 90 days, user-initiated backups are kept forever, unless you delete them. For more information about user-initiated backups, see Working with user-initiated backups.

You can use the AWS CLI or one of the AWS SDKs to change the backup window and backup retention period for your file systems. Use the UpdateFileSystem API operation or the update-file-system CLI command.

Working with user-initiated backups

With Amazon FSx, you can manually take backups of your file systems at any time. You can do so using the Amazon FSx console, API, or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). Your user-initiated backups of Amazon FSx file systems never expire, and they are available for as long as you want to keep them. User-initiated backups are retained even after you delete the file system that was backed up. You can delete user-initiated backups only by using the Amazon FSx console, API, or CLI. They are never automatically deleted by Amazon FSx. For more information, see Deleting backups.

Creating user-initiated backups

The following procedure guides you through how to create a user-initiated backup in the Amazon FSx console for an existing file system.

To create a user-initiated file system backup

  1. Open the Amazon FSx console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/fsx/.

  2. From the console dashboard, choose the name of the file system that you want to back up.

  3. From Actions, choose Create backup.

  4. In the Create backup dialog box that opens, provide a name for your backup. Backup names can be a maximum of 256 Unicode characters, including letters, white space, numbers, and the special characters . + - = _ : /

  5. Choose Create backup.

You have now created your file system backup. You can find a table of all your backups in the Amazon FSx console by choosing Backups in the left side navigation. You can search for the name you gave your backup, and the table filters to only show matching results.

When you create a user-initiated backup as this procedure described, it has the type User-Initiated, and it has the Creating status until it is fully available.