Amazon Adds new Features to AWS Backup

AWS Backup was first released last year in January 2019 and since that time Amazon has reported that over 20,000 customers are using it to protect their Amazon cloud and on-premise services. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that enables you to centralize and automate the back up of AWS services as well as an on-premises resources using the AWS Storage Gateway. AWS Backup can protect Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon EFS file systems, and AWS Storage Gateway volumes.

Some of the enhancements that Amazon has made to AWS Backup in January 2020 include:

• The ability to back up entire Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances — When you back up an EC2 instance, AWS Backup will protect all EBS volumes attached to the instance. You can restore the EC2 instance using the AWS Backup console, command line or API.
• The ability to restore a single file from your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) – You no longer need to restore the full EFS file system to retrieve a single item. You can now get improved Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) by restoring individual files or directories from your EFS filesystem. For single file restore, AWS Backup will create a new EFS recovery directory at the root of your original filesystem. You can then restore individual files to an existing filesystem or to a new filesystem.
• The ability to copy your backups to other AWS Regions – To provide improved disaster recovery capabilities you can now store copies of your AWS backups in different regions. You can do this manually or as part of your regularly scheduled backup procedures. You can also recover from the backups stored in the secondary regions.

You can learn more about AWS Backup at AWS Backup features. More information about the AWS Backup enhancements can be found at AWS Backup: EC2 Instances, EFS Single File Restore, and Cross-Region Backup.