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AWS Backup service

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Hi Folks,

We have configured AWS Backup service for EC2 service.

The scenario is, we have configured AWS backup service for EC2 with volume near 40 GB. The retention policy is 6 days for daily basis we configured.

What i want to clarify is, AWS Backup is incremental backup or full backup. If so, incremental backup then why it's taking full volume backup every day. (40GB)

How the retention policy worked, if 1st day took full copy of data of Volume that is 40 GB and second day it took incremental backup or full back up?

But if we keep 6 days of backup data so that the cost will increase in all 6 days

The billing for AWS Backup service is not visible in billing dashboard. So, how do we find out the charges of running backup service?

asked 2 years ago1.6K views
6 Answers
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AWS Backup is a flexible backup service that supports both incremental backups and full backups, depending on how you configure it. By default, AWS Backup performs incremental backups. However, if you configure your backup job to perform a full backup, it will take a full backup of your data every time the backup job runs.

Regarding your scenario, it's not clear whether you have configured your backup job to perform a full backup or incremental backup. However, it's important to note that even if you have configured an incremental backup, the first backup job that runs will always take a full backup of your data, as there is no previous backup to compare with.

As for the retention policy, AWS Backup keeps a backup of your data based on the retention rules that you configure. If you have configured a retention policy of 6 days, AWS Backup will keep the backups of the data for 6 days, and after that, the backup data will be automatically deleted.

Regarding the billing, you can view them in AWS Cost Explorer. You can filter your usage by service and select AWS Backup to see the charges for your backup jobs. Alternatively, you can use the AWS Billing and Cost Management API to get detailed billing information for your AWS account.

answered 2 years ago
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Greetings AWS Backup is an incremental backup service, which means that it only backs up the data that has changed since the last backup was taken. However, the first backup that is taken is a full backup, which means that all data is backed up. This is to ensure that a complete backup of the data is available in case of a restore.

In your case, it's possible that the backup size is appearing to be 40 GB every day because the first backup taken was a full backup. Subsequent backups should only be incremental and should be smaller in size.

Regarding the retention policy, AWS Backup follows a grandfather-father-son retention model. This means that the retention policy applies differently to daily, weekly, and monthly backups. In your case, since you have configured a daily backup with a 6-day retention policy, the daily backups will be retained for 6 days, after which they will be deleted.

The first backup taken will be retained for 6 days, along with all subsequent incremental backups. After 6 days, only the most recent backup will be retained, and all previous backups will be deleted.

Regarding billing, AWS Backup charges are not visible in the Billing and Cost Management console by default. You can view the charges by going to the AWS Backup console, selecting the backup plan, and then selecting the "Dashboard" tab. The dashboard will show you the total number of backups, restore points, and data transferred, as well as the associated costs. You can also use the AWS Cost Explorer tool to view backup costs over a specific time period. Please let me know if i answered your question

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EXPERT
answered 2 years ago
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AWS Backup stores your periodic backups incrementally. The first backup of an AWS resource backs up a full copy of your data. For each successive incremental backup, only the changes to your AWS resources are backed up. Although each backup after the first one is incremental (meaning it only captures changes from the previous backup), all backups made with AWS Backup retain the necessary reference data to allow a full restore. This is true even if the original (full) backup has reached the end of its lifecycle and been deleted.

For example, if your day 1 (full) backup was deleted due to a 3-day lifecycle policy, you would still be able to perform a full restore with the backups from days 2 and 3. AWS Backup maintains the necessary reference data from day 1 to do so.

To understand charges of AWS Backup , navigate to the “Elastic Cloud Compute” portion of your bill and expand it. Then, expand the region where your EC2/EBS resources and backups are. Lastly, look under the “EBS” section of the bill.

There are two things you look for on this part of the bill: the size of your EBS volumes and the size of the backups themselves. This will give you an idea of the bill

AWS
answered 2 years ago
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The bulk of EC2 backup contents are EBS backups. Storage is incremental despite the size always appearing to be the volume size. For a deep dive on this, see https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aws-elastic-block-store-how-analyse-snapshot-storage-usage-kinsman/ .

EXPERT
answered 2 years ago
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Q1 : How to configure/choose our backup job to perform a full back up or Incremental backup. I could not find that option in AWS backup service.

The scenario is, we have configured AWS backup service for EC2 instance on daily basis with volume of 40 GB and Retention policy is 6 days. I understand that the first backup of an AWS resource backs up a full copy of your data. (Full Backup). So, when its backup the instance for the next following days it takes full back up or incremental backup.

When we check the backed-up instance in backup vault it shows volume of 40GB for every single backup on every day. Whether it's taking full back up on daily basis or incremental?

What i want to clarify is, AWS Backup is incremental backup or full backup. If so, incremental backup then why it's taking full volume backup every day. (40GB)

We have configured 6 days retention policy. The first day of retention is expired so full backup has been deleted or it is moved to incremental backup. What happens for 7th day, how it will back up? Again, it takes full backup for the 7th day.

answered 2 years ago
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I understand your confusion about full vs incremental, which is why I wrote https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aws-elastic-block-store-how-analyse-snapshot-storage-usage-kinsman/ - it explains all.

AWS describe EBS snapshots as "incremental", which is literally how the storage is implemented, but this description sells them short. The usual trade-offs between traditional full, incremental and differential backups don't apply here; what a lot of people miss is that in practice when you use snapshots they're full backups. Snapshots have the low storage use and quick backup advantages of incremental backups, but also the fast "single thing to restore" advantage of full backups. You don't need to restore the latest full backup followed by every incremental backup since, as you do with a traditional incremental backup scheme.

So you can think of all your EBS snapshots as full backups except when you look at your bill and see you're being charged for a lot less storage than you'd expect. Each snapshot is "full" in that it contains full metadata pointing to the version of every block in S3 needed to do a full restore. However if the same version of a block is referenced from multiple snapshots then it's only stored once, so storage is incremental. Also reducing your bill is that empty blocks in a volume aren't stored in a snapshot, and data blocks are compressed. Note the amount of compression will vary enormously depending on the type of data stored in a block.

Understanding how much snapshots cost to keep is made harder by the AWS Console which just displays the size of each snapshot as being the size of the volume at the time the snapshot was taken. Maybe this is partly to encourage people to think of every snapshot as "full", because in every way you interact with them they are, but it can be very misleading. For example let's say you have a 1 TB drive with only 1 GB of data on it that isn't changing, and you take 100 snapshots. Your first snapshot will use 1 GB of storage (or less due to compression) and the other 99 won't use any storage at all, but the AWS Console will show that you have 100 TB of snapshots!

When a snapshot is deleted, each referenced data block is only deleted if no other snapshots reference it. That's the case even for your oldest "full" snapshot - when you delete it, the next-latest snapshot still references all of the same data blocks (other than what's changed between the two snapshots) and is a "full" snapshot.

EXPERT
answered 2 years ago

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