Backup Exporters

The backup exporters are AWS EC2 instances that execute the backup and restore processes. They are created when a backup cycle is initiated and terminated when all volumes have been backed up and the backup cycle is done. An exporter is also started up when a restore command is received.

It is recommended to configure the backup instance type as c5n.xlarge. The backup process will start up two of these instances to run in parallel on the volume backups and restores.

Process Overview

1. Backup:

• When the backup scheduled time comes up, a Lambda process will take a snapshot of all volumes in the cluster.
• Start up the exporter instances.
• The Lambda process will then create a clone based on each of the taken snapshots and send the backup jobs to the exporter process.
• If this is the first backup of the volume, the exporter process will copy the data from the snapshot to S3 storage (full backup).
• If an existing backup already exists, the exporter process will only copy over the incremental changes since the previous backup (incremental backup).
• When all volumes have been backed up, exporter instances will be terminated.
• The next backup schedule is set up.

2. Restore:

• Update the parameters to trigger a restore of a specific volume.
• A process identifies the trigger and starts up an exporter instance (if there are none up at the time).
• Start the restore process.
• At the end of the process, you will have a volume in Lightbits with the name given in the configuration.

3. Backup Retention: A bucket lifecycle rule will delete old backups.