Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is 1 year old this week, has added three new features to its managed back-up service.
AWS Backup was launched in January and provides organizations with a central portal that allows them to manage, schedule, and automate backup tasks across all AWS services. The company announced three new capabilities on Monday.
Since AWS Backup’s launch last year, the first, cross-region backup support, has been in development. This allows users to store backup data in another region. This can be done either manually or as part of a regular backup process. Customers can also recover from backups in the second area.
Customers who have strict business continuity policies (require a minimum distance between backup copies) will find it particularly helpful to be able to store backups in another region, according to Sebastien Stormacq’s Monday blog post.
Another new capability, “item-level Recovery,” allows users to restore individual files and directories in Amazon Elastic File System. Stormacq explained that users can delete a single file by accident and not need to restore the entire file system.
“Select the backup, then type the relative path to the file or directory you wish to restore.
He wrote that Elastic File System will create a new Elastic File System Recovery directory at the root filesystem. This will preserve the original path hierarchy. You can either restore your files to an existing or a new filesystem.
This week’s third feature is the ability to fully back up and recover EC2 instances. Stormacq stated that “When you back-up an EC2 instance of AWS Backup,
It will protect all EBS volumes that are attached to the instance and attach them to an AMI which stores all parameters of the original EC2 instance, except for two (Elastic Inference Accelerator) and user data script.
Users can restore an entire EC2 instance using the AWS Backup console or command line, or via API.
Stormacq has more information about each of these features. You can find it here.