Backups

Commvault backs up all of the instances identified on the Content tab for a subclient.

When multiple VSA proxies are available, a proxy in the same zone is given priority, or a proxy in the same region if no proxy in the same zone is available.

What Gets Backed Up

• Active EC2 instances (powered on or powered off)

• Instance EBS volumes

• Volumes using default or custom encryption

What Does Not Get Backed Up

• AMIs

• Instance store volumes

Considerations

Snapshot operations might take a long time to complete for large instances, causing backups to fail on multiple attempts. To resolve this issue, see Controlling the Polling Interval for Snapshot Creation Status.

Backup Process

IntelliSnap backups include the following stages:

1. Discover instances for the subclient being backed up.

2. Capture configuration information for instances, including volumes for the instances.

3. For each instance, create an AMI.

   This operation creates crash-consistent snapshots of instance volumes.

4. Write the instance configuration file and instance metadata to the backup index.

5. Deregister the AMI and retain the snapshots on Amazon.

Backup Copy Process

After IntelliSnap backups, the following additional steps are performed for backup copies:

1. Create volumes from snapshots.

2. Download configuration files for instances.

3. Attach volumes to the VSA proxy.

4. Back up the volumes by using CRC for incremental changes, and transfer the data through the MediaAgent for the storage policy associated with the backup operation.

   If CBT is enabled, the changed block tracking mechanism is used to get the list of allocated blocks for full backups and the changed blocks for incremental backups.

   Note

   When the retention rule for backup copies is set to spool copy, for Amazon CBT, one snapshot per volume per instance is retained for comparison.