Volume Backups and Clones

Backup and Restore

Backup and restore operations are supported on boot volumes, data volumes, and volume groups. All backups are full backups, not incremental.

To back up a boot volume, block volume, or volume group, use one of the following methods:

Clone: Cloning volumes enables you to create a copy without performing the backup and restore operations. For more information about clones, see the "Clones" section and "Differences Between Volume Clones and Backups" table below. For general information about cloning boot volumes, see Cloning a Boot Volume.
Manual backup: These backups are performed one time as soon as you create the backup. These backups are retained indefinitely, or until a policy-based (scheduled) backup is created for this volume.
Scheduled backups: These backups are performed periodically according to a schedule defined in a backup policy. The policy schedule specifies the frequency (period) and time of the backups, and how long to retain the backups. You can create your own backup policies, or you can use Oracle provided backup policies.

Oracle Provided Backup Policies

Oracle defined backup policies cannot be used to back up a volume group. These policies can be used to back up individual block volumes and boot volumes.

Oracle defined policies cannot be changed. If you need a different backup time or retention time, for example, create a user defined backup policy as described in "Managing Backup Policies" in the Block Volume Storage chapter in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance User Guide.

The following backup policies are provided by Oracle and available in every compartment. A resource can have only one backup policy assigned, but a backup policy can have multiple schedules. The Oracle Bronze policy has one schedule, the Silver policy has two schedules, and the Gold policy has three schedules. All schedule times are your regional data center time. All backup types are full backups.

Bronze

Monthly backups that run at 00:00 on the first day of the month and are retained for twelve months.

Silver

Weekly backups that run at 00:00 every Monday and are retained for four weeks.
Monthly backups that run at 00:00 on the first day of the month and are retained for twelve months.

Gold

Daily backups that run at 00:00 and are retained for seven days.
Weekly backups that run at 00:00 every Monday and are retained for four weeks.
Monthly backups that run at 00:00 on the first day of the month and are retained for twelve months.

The Block Volume service will not run more than one scheduled backup of a particular resource in one day. When schedules conflict, for example, daily, weekly, and monthly backups are scheduled to run at the same time, the backup with the longest period runs.

Volume Group Back Up and Restore

You can perform most of the same backup operations and tasks with volume groups that you can perform with individual block volumes.

Volume group backups enable you to manage the backup settings for several volumes in one place. This feature simplifies the process to create time-consistent backups of running enterprise applications that span multiple storage volumes across multiple compute instances.

You can restore a volume group backup to a volume group, or you can restore individual volumes in the volume group from volume backups.

Clones

You can create a clone from a volume using the Block Volume service. Cloning enables you to make a copy of an existing block volume without needing to go through the backup and restore process.

The clone operation occurs immediately, and you can attach and use the cloned volume as a regular volume when the state changes to Available. At this point, the volume data is being copied in the background, and can take up to thirty minutes depending on the size of the volume.

There is a single point-in-time reference for a source volume while it is being cloned. If the source volume is attached when a clone is created, you need to wait for the first clone operation to complete from the source volume before creating additional clones. If the source volume is detached, you can create up to 10 clones from the same source volume simultaneously.

You can only create a clone for a volume within the same tenant. You can create a clone of a volume in a different compartment from the source volume compartment if you have the required access permissions.

Differences Between Volume Clones and Backups

Consider the following criteria when you decide whether to create a backup or a clone of a volume.

Comparison	Volume Backup	Volume Clone
Description	Creates a point-in-time backup of data on a volume. You can restore multiple new volumes from the backup later in the future.	Creates an immediately usable copy of a block volume without having to go through the backup and restore process.
Use Case	Retain a backup of the data in a volume, so that you can duplicate an environment later or preserve the data for future use. Meet compliance and regulatory requirements, because the data in a backup remains unchanged over time. Support business continuity requirements. Reduce the risk of outages or data mutation over time.	Creates an immediately usable copy of a block volume without having to go through the backup and restore process.
Storage Location	Block Volume	Block Volume
Retention Policy	Policy-based backups expire, manual backups do not expire.	No expiration
Volume Groups	Supported. You can back up a volume group.	Supported. You can clone a volume group.