How To Create Backups

There are three ways to create backups of the Master Server:

• Create an Amazon EBS Snapshot (recommended)
• Use Automated Backups
• Use Manual Backups

Create an Amazon EBS Snapshot

To create a backup from an Amazon EBS snapshot, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to the AWS EC2 console.
2. In the left navigation panel of the EC2 Dashboard, under the Elastic Block Store section, click Volumes.
3. Select the volume of your ER Cloud data (e.g. <CloudFormation stack name>-ERCLOUDDATA).
4. On the upper right side of the page, click Actions > Create snapshot.

5. In the Create snapshot page, complete the following sections:

   Section	Description
   Details	In the Description field, enter the description for your snapshot.
   Tags	In the Key field, enter a label for your tag (e.g. Name tag), and in the Value - optional field, enter the corresponding value (e.g. ERCLOUDDATA-SNAPSHOT), if any.

6. Click Create snapshot.
7. In the Snapshots page, view the status of the newly created snapshot volume and wait until the status is "Available".

Use Automated Backups

Automated backups of the Master Server can only be scheduled from the Server Information page in the Web Console.

To create an automated backup policy in the default location:

1. Log in to the ER Cloud Web Console.
2. Go to System > Server Information page.
3. On the Server Information page, go to the Backup section and click the Edit icon.
4. Select Enable auto-backup and click Confirm.

5. In the Edit Backups dialog box, fill in the following fields:

   Field	Description
   Enable auto-backup	Select to begin configuring the automatic backup policy.
   Notify me if the backup fails	Sets up a new notification policy in Settings > Notifications > Notification Policy.
   Frequency	Select frequency of automatic backup jobs.
   Date/ Time	Select date and time of the next automatic backup job.
   Location	Enter the destination folder to store the automatic backups. This location path must begin with volume (e.g. volume/backups).
   Backups to keep	Enter the maximum number of backups the Master Server stores. If there are more backups stored than the maximum, the Master Server removes the oldest backups.

6. Click Confirm to create the automatic backup policy. The "Backup" section now displays the details of your automatic backup policy.

Backup Status

A list of backup jobs are displayed under the backup policy details. The jobs have the following statuses:

• COMPLETED: Completed backup jobs are stored on the Master Server, in the path displayed under the "Location" column.
• PENDING: Backup jobs that are waiting to start.
• RUNNING: Backup jobs that are in progress.
• INTERRUPTED: Backups are interrupted when the Master Server restarts mid-job. You cannot resume an interrupted backup.
• ERROR: Backup jobs that have encountered an error and cannot continue.

Delete Backups

To delete backups:

1. Hover over the backup entry. Delete appears to the right of the backup entry.
   
2. Click Delete.
3. Click Confirm to permanently delete the backup.

Use Manual Backups

To create a manual backup of the Master Server:

# SSH to the EC2 instance. ssh -i <path-to-the-sshkey.pem-file> ec2-user@<IP address or public DNS name>
# Run the ER Cloud backup command. /home/ec2-user/er-cloud.sh backup

Manual Backup Commands

Use these commands to monitor the backup status in the Master Server Console:

Restore Backups

For details on restoring backups from the Master Server console, see Restore Backups.