Backup Calendar Portlet – Heirloom Computing

The Backup Calendar Portlet of the Heirloom Dashboard is the way to manage backups for your persistent data volumes (application files and databases) produced to support your production deployed applications running in the cloud. Group administrator users can manage all the backups of the data volumes of all users in your group. Access the dashboard through paas.heirloomcomputing.com > Sign In > Dashboard.

Access the portlet from the Data Volumes Portlet by right-clicking on a volume and selecting Show Backups from the menu. You can use the right or left arrows on the calendar to advance the months displayed. Or, select the pull-down menu on the month and year to quickly change months. Return to the current month and day at any time by clicking the Today button. Left-click on a particular date to view a list of one or more backups taken on that date. Grayed-out dates indicate that no backup was taken on that day.

Based on your subscription, backups are taken automatically for all your volumes on an hourly, daily, weekly and monthly basis. Backups won't be taken if your volume was not in-use on that date or the amount of time since the prior backup (based on your subscription) has not elapsed. Live backups are taken of volumes in-use. You can also take immediate backups of your data volumes through the Data Volumes Portlet.

For example, the standard paid schedule consists of daily backups taken at approximately 2am UTC ( 4pm PDT, 7PM EDT)). It is approximate because the time it takes to complete a backup varies depending upon the load of the underlying infrastructure. Daily backups are managed and converted to weekly and monthly backups according to the following schedule:

Daily backups with retention of 7 days
Weekly backups with retention of 5 weeks
Monthly backups with retention of 7 years (72 months)

Backups are converted from one form to another as new backups are taken. For example, as shown in the following Backup Portlet taken on May 25th :

The above snapshot of the Backup Portlet on May 25th shows that a daily backups have been taken for May 18th through May 24th (the backup for May 25th has not been taken at the time of this snapshot). The May 20th backup, although tagged as a daily will be converted to a Weekly Backup within a few days. Previous daily backups on May 6th and May 13th have been converted to Weekly Backups. Clicking the left arrow in the upper left corner would reveal other Weekly Backups in April. Finally, a daily backup taken on May 1st has been converted to this month's Monthly Backup, as shown in the figure.

An entire or full backup is taken of the underlying device housing your application files and database. Typically backups are taken over a period of seconds. Because these backup transactions are not synced with your application, you may experience inconsistency among database records or file records. Standard database and database and file system checking (e.g., database undo/redo log application) are required should you restore from an in-use backup. Based on your subscription and level of instance concurrency associated with it, you can restore from one or more backups at once and use (application techniques) to move data records among the backups to your live system.

Restoration of a backup tape implies the starting of a new instance of your application (with a new domain name to access it) and does not affect the running system. Restored systems are not meant to become "live" as the restored systems are temporary and the volumes associated with them will be removed when the instance is shut down. Use application techniques (or the file management interface provided to Heirloom instances) to move data between the restored instance and your production instance.

When you select a backup from the list available for a particular day a dialog box will show information about that particular backup.

The dialog indicates the type of backup (e.g., daily), the time it was taken and whether the backup was taken from a live running system (in-use), the integrity of the backup (100% Complete indicates a healthy backup) and whether you have restored it at any time prior to this date. From this dialog you can,

Restore a volume by starting a new instance of your application,
Delete the backup tape associated with the volume,
Cancel out of the menu without acting on the backup tape.

Not all users will see the Backup Calendar Portlet. Backup tape management comes with specific subscriptions. You may need to become an administrator of your group.

Click on the links in the upper right hand corner of the portlet to change or refresh the view.

minimize the view. You can drag and drop the view to reposition it on the dashboard
refresh the backup calendar (all months)
close the portlet. You can reopen by right-clicking on a specific volume in the Data Volumes Portlet and choosing Show Backups from the menu

Note: On occasion a backup may fail to take place at the selected time. Backups will be attempted every hour until a valid backup is completed. You may see variability in the backup time for this reason. Each backup is replicated in 3 places for redundancy. Although this generally ensures that physical hardware failure will not cause the loss of data, the current status ("100% complete") always reflects the consistency and availability of a backup.

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