Backups at Aiven#

On top of general rules for handling service backups in Aiven, there are service-specific backup details, such as backup frequency and retention period per service. Backup policies for service power-off/on and service deletion are common for all the services, similarly as the backup access policy.

About backups at Aiven#

All Aiven services, except for Apache Kafka® and M3 Aggregator/Coordinator, have time-based backups that are encrypted and securely stored. Backups at Aiven are stored in the object storage of the cloud region where the service is first created (for example, S3 for AWS or GCS for GCP). You can check the location of your service’s backups in Aiven Console > your service’s homepage > Backups.

The backup retention times vary based on the service and the selected service plan.

Aiven takes service backups for managing purposes. These backups are compressed and encrypted by the Aiven management platform and, as such, are not available for download for any service type.

Note

If you change a cloud provider or an availability zone for your service, its backups are not migrated from their original location.

Service power-off/on backup policy#

Whenever a service is powered on from a powered-off state, the latest available backup is restored.

Services that have been powered off for more than 180 days are reviewed. A notification email will be sent to you to provide time for taking action before the service and backup are deleted as part of the periodic cleanup of powered-off services.

If you wish to keep the powered-off service for more than 180 days, power on the service and then power it off again to avoid the routine cleanup.

Service backup deletion policy#

For services that have been deleted for over 41 days, all the backups are automatically deleted and, hence, no longer available.

Access to backups#

The Aiven platform takes care of all maintenance operations required for running complex software at scale, allowing you to focus on using your services. The open-source tools used for service backups can be leveraged in your own infrastructure.

Since service backups are encrypted and stored in the object storage, accessing them is not possible. If you do need to backup your service, use the standard tooling for this service.

Recommended backup tools per service are as follows:

PostgreSQL®: pgdump
MySQL®: mysqldump
Redis®*: redis-cli
Cassandra®: cqlsh
OpenSearch®: elasticdump
InfluxDB®: influxd

Note

The listed backup tools are merely recommendations and are not intended to create a snapshot of your Aiven service but to provide access to the data.

Backup profile per service#

Depending on the service plan, each service provides different backups with different retention periods. Check out the hourly and daily backups with the number of days of retention provided in the table.

Service type	Backup retention time based on service Plan
Service type	Hobbyist	Startup	Business	Premium
Aiven for Apache Kafka®	No backups	No backups	No backups	No backups
Aiven for PostgreSQL® / MySQL	Single backup only for disaster recovery	2 days with PITR	14 days with PITR	30 days with PITR
Aiven for OpenSearch®	Single backup only for disaster recovery	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 3 days	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 14 days	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 30 days
Aiven for Apache Cassandra®	Plan not available	Single day backup	Single day backup	Single day backup
Aiven for Redis®*	Single backup only for disaster recovery	Backup every 12 hours up to 1 day	Backup every 12 hours up to 3 days	Backup every 12 hours up to 13 days
Aiven for InfluxDB®	Plan not available	Backup every 12 hours up to 2.5 days	Plan not available	Plan not available
Aiven for Apache Flink®	Plan not available	Hourly backup up to 2 hours	Hourly backup up to 2 hours	Plan not available
Aiven for M3	Plan not available	Single day backup	Daily backup up to 6 days	Daily backup up to 13 days
Aiven for M3 Aggregator / Coordinator	Plan not available	Plan not available	No backups	No backups
Aiven for Grafana®	Plan not available	Backup every 1 hour up to 1 day	Plan not available	Plan not available
Aiven for ClickHouse®	Daily backups up to 2 days	Daily backups up to 2 days	Daily backups up to 14 days	Daily backups up to 30 days

There are specific backup strategies for particular service types.

Aiven for Apache Kafka®#

Aiven for Apache Kafka is usually used as a transport tool for data rather than a permanent store. Due to the way it stores data, traditional backup strategies are not feasible. As a result, Aiven does not perform backups for managed Apache Kafka services, and data durability is determined by data replication across the cluster.

However, automatic backups for essential Apache Kafka® service configurations are offered through configuration backups, and they come at no extra cost. If the Apache Kafka® service is powered off/on or if any incidents lead to the cluster’s failure, the configuration backup facilitates restoring your Apache Kafka® service to its previous state.

To back up data passing through Apache Kafka, we recommend using one of the following tools:

MirrorMaker 2 to replicate the data to another cluster, which could be an Aiven service or a Apache Kafka cluster on your own infrastructure. With MirrorMaker 2, the backup cluster operates as an independent Apache Kafka service. You can freely choose a zone for your backup service since it operates independently from the primary service.

Note

MirrorMaker 2 provides tools for mapping between the source and target offset, so you don’t need to make this calculation. For more details, see section Offset Mapping in blog post A look inside Kafka MirrorMaker 2.
Kafka Connect to backup the cluster, for instance, sinking data from Apache Kafka® to S3 via a dedicated Aiven connector.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for PostgreSQL®#

For Aiven for PostgreSQL, full daily backups are taken, and WAL segments are constantly archived to the cloud object storage. In case of node failure,

For a business or premium plan, Aiven can reconstruct the latest state from a replica
For a startup plan, Aiven can reconstruct the latest state from the latest base backup and replay the latest WAL segments on top of that.

You can supplement this with a remote read-only replica service, which you can run in a different cloud region or with another cloud provider and promote to master if needed.

To shift the backup schedule to a new time, you can modify the backup time configuration option in Advanced configuration in Aiven Console (the service’s Service settings page). If a recent backup has been taken, it may take another backup cycle before the new backup time takes effect.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for MySQL®#

Aiven for MySQL databases are automatically backed up with full daily backups and binary logs recorded continuously. All backups are encrypted with the open source myhoard software. Myhoard uses Percona XtraBackup internally for taking full (or incremental) snapshots for MySQL.

See also

For more information, refer to MySQL Backups.

Aiven for OpenSearch®#

Aiven for OpenSearch databases are automatically backed up, encrypted, and stored securely in the object storage. The backups are taken every hour, and the retention period varies based on the service plan.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for Apache Cassandra®#

Aiven for Apache Cassandra backups are taken every 24 hours. The point-in-time recovery (PITR) feature is currently not available.

Note

If you’d like to be notified once the PITR feature is available for Cassandra, contact the Aiven support.

Aiven for Redis™*#

Aiven for Redis backups are taken every 12 hours.

For persistence, Aiven supports Redis Database Backup (RDB).

You can control the persistence feature using redis_persistence under Advanced configuration in Aiven Console (the service’s Service settings page):

When redis_persistence is set to rdb, Redis does RDB dumps every 10 minutes if any key is changed. Also, RDB dumps are done according to the backup schedule for backup purposes.
When redis_persistence is off, no RDB dumps or backups are done, so data can be lost at any moment if the service is restarted for any reason or if the service is powered off. This also means the service can’t be forked.

Note

AOF persistence is currently not supported by Aiven for the managed Redis service.

Aiven for InfluxDB®#

Aiven for InfluxDB backups are taken every 12 hours with 2.5 days of retention. InfluxDB® is automatically backed up, encrypted, and uploaded to Aiven’s S3 account in the same region. When an instance has to be rebuilt, the backup is downloaded and restored to create a new instance.

Aiven for ClickHouse®#

Aiven for ClickHouse® provides automatic daily backups. The Astacus backup manager for distributed databases runs on all nodes to coordinate backups of cluster databases.

Each file to be backed up is encrypted, compressed, and uploaded to an object storage (Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage) in the same region.

Aiven for ClickHouse backups contain database lists, table schemas, table content, and access entities (such as users or roles). They are backed up incrementally: files already present in the object storage are not re-uploaded and only changed parts are backed up.

Note

Aiven for ClickHouse doesn’t support so-called streaming backups: when a service is powered off, all data written after the last backup gets lost. For more information about limitations on Aiven for ClickHouse backups, see Aiven for ClickHouse limitations.

See also

For more information on Aiven for ClickHouse backups, see Backup and restore.