Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers who use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), a highly available and durable file storage service, choose to implement a backup solution to be able to recover from unintended changes or deletions to their file systems.
AWS offers this EFS-to-EFS Backup guidance to automatically create incremental backups of an Amazon EFS file system on a customer-defined schedule.
AWS Solutions Implementation overview
Important: AWS Backup, a fully managed backup service, enables you to centrally manage backups for Amazon EFS file systems. AWS recommends that you evaluate AWS Backup for your specific use case before you use this solution. AWS recommends using AWS Backup to implement a backup solution for Amazon EFS to recover from unintended user changes or deletions. For the most current Amazon EFS availability by Region, refer to the Regional Product Services table. If AWS Backup is not available in your Region, use this EFS-to-EFS Backup Guidance.
EFS-to-EFS Backup allows you to automatically back up Amazon EFS file systems. The diagram below presents the components and functionality you can build using the example code on GitHub.
EFS-to-EFS Backup architecture
An Amazon CloudWatch event runs on an interval you define during initial configuration. This event invokes the solution’s orchestrator AWS Lambda function.
The Lambda function launches an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, creates an ID for the backup, and stores details on the backup Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system in an Amazon DynamoDB table.
The Amazon EC2 instance mounts the source and backup Amazon EFS file systems and initiates the backup. When the backup process completes, the instance updates the backup activity details in the DynamoDB table and sends logs to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. Then, the instance is terminated.
If the backup is unsuccessful, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) sends a notification to subscribed email addresses. You can also choose to be notified if the backup is successful.
Additional resources
Features
EFS-to-EFS Backup reference implementation
Consistent backups
Incremental Backups
Granular Backups
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