Disaster recovery

When you create a new server in Cleura Cloud you will notice an option named Disaster recovery, which is enabled by default.

Even if you choose to disable it for a particular server, keep in mind that you have the option to enable it at a later time.

In the following, we explain what this option does, how it works in the background, and why you should consider enabling it.

What it is

The Disaster Recovery (DR) feature is available via the Cleura Cloud Management Panel and applies to servers and volumes that use our Ceph backend. That would be all servers but the ones of the s flavor.

How it works

As soon as you enable DR for a server or a single volume, you start getting snapshots for the corresponding RADOS Block Device (RBD) image. Those snapshots are created automatically once per day, and you always have the snapshots of the last 10 days.

Please keep in mind that all RBD snapshots are created in the same Ceph cluster and are not replicated remotely. If, for any reason, you delete the original volume, then all snapshots will also be deleted, and the snapshot creation schedule will be canceled immediately.

Why enable it

Provided snapshots are available, you can restore a server or a single volume to any of those snapshots. For instance, you may discover that due to faulty application logic or simply a bug, you are now experiencing data corruption. Then, one of your options would be to go back in time by restoring one of the available snapshots and keep going from there.

Restoration time

You should know that the DR feature creates point-in-time snapshots on the storage level. The time required to restore a server to a particular snapshot depends on its size. During restoration, the server is shut off. After the restore, you need to power the server back on manually. Although this whole process takes time analogous to volume size, as we pointed out, we should also note that it only takes seconds to complete on average.