Streamline search and item-level recovery with AWS Backup

Recovering data after a disaster or a ransomware incident headlines today’s news. But in the day-to-day, you are more likely to recover a file from a directory than to restore an entire data set. However, doing so without being able to search and restore the specific items you need can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s like going to the library and having to browse every shelf because the book catalog is not available.

Today, AWS announced the availability of AWS Backup search and item-level recovery for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) backups. This feature makes it easier for you to centrally search for and restore specific items, like files or objects, across your AWS Backup managed Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 backups. You can now search for files or objects with just a few clicks, reducing recovery cost and time.

In this blog post, we explore the capabilities of AWS Backup search and item-level recovery for Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 backups. We will walk though how to configure item-level recovery for Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 backup. And we will perform a search and then, a restore of specific files from a range of Amazon EBS snapshots.

Knowing what is in your backups

To use this new feature, AWS Backup is adding an option for you to create an index of all or a select number of their Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 backups. This index stores and catalogs all the metadata for a backup, allowing you to search for items using properties such as creation time, item size, file path, and object key. AWS Backup doesn’t index the contents of any file or object, maintaining privacy for your data. When a specific item or set of items have been found, you can then choose to initiate a restore of selected items. This eliminates time consuming tasks such as having to restore multiple backups in order to locate the item you need.

Using AWS Backup search and item-level recovery for Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 backups

To get started, you need to either index an existing backup or create a new backup and enable indexing as an option when creating a backup plan or an on-demand backup task. For this post, you create a new on-demand backup of an Amazon EBS volume called “Doc-Repository.” When you create an on-demand backup, you now observe a checkbox to create a backup index, if you are backing up Amazon EBS or Amazon S3. You can also enable indexing of Amazon EBS or Amazon S3 backups in a new or existing backup plan by checking off the Backup index option when creating or editing the backup rule associated with the backup plan in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Create backup index for on-demand backup job

Once the backup job has completed, you can drill into the new recovery point and observe the index status under the new Backup index section. For existing recovery points that haven’t been indexed, you can use the Create backup index button to create a new index in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Create backup index for existing recovery point

Once indexing is complete, you can search for an item in a specific indexed recovery point or across multiple indexed recovery points. You can initiate a search from the Recovery point page or from the new Search page. In this example, you start by choosing the new Search option in the left-hand side of the AWS Backup console in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Create a new search job

You create a new search and input the relevant search parameters. You are searching through multiple Amazon EBS recovery points for mp4 files with “Sizzle” in their names. In this example, you search, in Backup properties, for backups with a creation date between October 27^th, 2024 and October 31^st, 2024. To search for files that contain the word “Sizzle” in the file name, you search for file paths that contain “Sizzle” in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Enter search criteria

When the search job is complete, you scroll down to the Search Results section to observe the results that match your search parameters, as shown in the following figure. You can also export the results to an Amazon S3 bucket if you want to retain a record of previous searches.

Figure 5: Search job results

You can select one or multiple files to restore. In this example, you are restoring the file, “Sizzle-3.mp4,” in Figure 6. AWS Backup doesn’t restore over the original file. Instead, the restored file is downloaded to an Amazon S3 bucket that you created previously. For Amazon S3, objects can be restored to the same source bucket or to a different bucket. If the restore is to the same bucket, then it exists alongside the original Amazon S3 object.

Figure 6: Restore selected file from Amazon EBS snapshot

Once the restore is done and the file has been uploaded to Amazon S3, you observe the restore job confirmed as complete in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Item restore job

Go to the designated Amazon S3 bucket and observe the restored file in Figure 8. From there, you can download the object and copy to the source Amazon EBS volume.

Figure 8: Locate restored file

Pricing

Users are charged for the creation of the number of items indexed and the storage consumed by the indexes. They are also be charged by the number of items searched and the items restored. Users can find pricing details on the AWS Backup pricing page.

Clean-up

If you are following this post and created indexes that are no longer needed, please delete them to avoid additional charges. You can delete indexes from the Recovery point page in Figure 9.

Figure 9: Delete backup index

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to set up and use AWS Backup search and item-level recovery for Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 backups. This feature is now available in all commercial AWS Regions and streamlines the process for item-level restores, decreasing the time it takes to recover your important data. To learn more, please go to the AWS Backup Developer Guide.