Since ObjectiveFS is a regular filesystem, you can use a regular filesystem backup program such as restic, incremental tar, rsync, etc to backup your filesystem. It is common to backup your data to a different S3 bucket or to a different cloud provider (e.g. Google Cloud storage, AWS Azure Blob Storage, etc) for redundancy.
You can also rsync between two ObjectiveFS filesystems (one primary and a backup) and the backup filesystem can be in the same or different region or with a different cloud provider.
Snapshots can be useful for backups since they give a consistent point-in-time view of the filesystem. You can mount a recent snapshot and use it as the source for backup, instead of running backup from your live filesystem. This way, your data will not change while the backup is in progress, providing a consistent point-in-time backup copy of your filesystem. See this article for an example.
You can also run backups on a different server from your regular production servers. Just mount your filesystem or a filesystem snapshot on the backup server and use it as the source. When using a backup server for regular backups (e.g. hourly, daily, etc), using a persistent disk cache on the backup server can reduce the amount of S3 requests and data transfer since the backup server does not need to bring in the data each time.
For filesystems mounted as read-write, we do not recommend using AWS S3 cross-region replication for backup purpose since objects can arrive in a different order at different times at the destination bucket. It is ok to use the AWS S3 cross-region replication for read-only filesystems or when the filesystem is not mounted.
You can use the built-in snapshots in ObjectiveFS to restore accidentally deleted files. Just mount the relevant snapshot and copy the relevant file back to the regular mount of your filesystem.
Example commands to list snapshots and restore a file from a snapshot:
$ mount.objectivefs list -sz <filesystem>
$ mount.objectivefs <snapshot> /snapshot
$ cp /snapshot/<path to file> /ofs/<path to file> If needed, for example if your S3 bucket region is down and your S3 bucket is not accessible, you can restore your data from your backup. The time to restore the backup is dependent on data size and backup tool. Doing a test restore can be helpful to assess the recovery time (RTO and RPO).
last updated by ObjectiveFS staff, April 22, 2021
ObjectiveFS is a shared file system for Linux and OS X that automatically scales and gives you scalable cloud storage.
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