How do I back up an EBS volume as a cron job?
Table of Contents
Background Information
You want to take regular backups of an EBS volume with EBS Snapshots via a cron job.
Answer
RightScale offers a suite of tools in the "EBS Toolbox" ServerTemplate for performing backup related tasks on EBS volumes. (Initially, we only offered MySQL centric tools with respect to EBS). This template provides the following RightScripts:
| RightScript | Short Description |
| EBS delete volume on halt | Script that will delete the existing and attached volume where the EBS volume is mounted. |
| EBS freeze volume backups | Prevent the continuous backup tasks from being executed. |
| EBS Rightscale tools install *+ | Installs RightScale EBS tools. |
| EBS unfreeze volume backups | Re-enables the EBS backup script in the crontab so it continues to be executed periodically. |
| EBS volume backup | Takes a manual backup of an EBS filesystem. |
| EBS volume continuous backups + | Updates the crontab for EBS snapshot backups, and installs the scripts required for manual backups. |
| EBS volume restore | Restores a filesystem from the latest EBS snapshot. |
* This script must be run prior 'EBS volume continuous backups'
+ This script must be run prior to 'EBS volume backup'
By importing this ServerTemplate from the MultiCloud Marketplace, you have effectively imported all of the above RightScripts. You may import only the scripts you need (including the dependencies).
For a more detailed description on each RightScript, see the description in the Dashboard on the Info tab of each RightScript.
Take note of the dependencies above and ensure you have run them first (and optionally add them to your ServerTemplate as boot scripts), then run 'EBS volume continuous backups' to add the regular backup job to cron. If you wish to take a once-off backup only, run 'EBS volume backup' after its dependencies.
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