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AWS Backup Gets More Functionality, Including 'Cross-Region' Support
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a trio of new features to its managed backup service, which turns 1 year old this week.
Launched last January, AWS Backup gives organizations a centralized portal from which they can manage, schedule and automate backup tasks across their various AWS services. On Monday, the company announced three new capabilities to the service.
The first, support for "cross-region" backups, has been in the works since AWS Backup's launch a year ago. This capability lets users store copies of their backup data in a different region. They can do this either manually as needed, or as part of their regularly scheduled backup procedure. Customers can also perform a recovery from the backup in the second region.
The ability to copy backups and store them in a different region is particularly useful for customers whose "strict business continuity policies [require] a minimum distance between two copies of their backup," according to a blog post Monday by AWS' Sébastien Stormacq.
A second new capability, dubbed "item-level recovery," enables users to restore individual files or directories in Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). If a user accidentally deletes a single file, for example, they no longer need to restore the full file system to retrieve it, Stormacq explained.
"You select the backup, type the relative path of the file or directory to restore, and AWS Backup will create a new Elastic File System recovery directory at the root of your filesystem, preserving the original path hierarchy," he wrote. "You can restore your files to an existing filesystem or to a new filesystem."
The third feature announced this week is the ability back up and recover EC2 instances in full. According to Stormacq, "When you back up an EC2 instance, AWS Backup will protect all EBS volumes attached to the instance, and it will attach them to an AMI that stores all parameters from the original EC2 instance except for two (Elastic Inference Accelerator and user data script)."
Users can restore the entire EC2 instance via the AWS Backup console, command line or API.
More information on each of these new features is available on Stormacq's post here.