Backup to Amazon S3 with NAKIVO Backup & Replication

Protecting backup data from a ransomware attack is always a challenge. With Amazon S3 Object Lock support in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can ensure that your backup data is protected from ransomware and other malicious or accidental changes. Once you enable S3 Object Lock for a recovery point, no one, not even users with admin rights, can delete, modify or encrypt the data for a user-defined retention period. This functionality ensures that your data is immutable for as long as you need to ensure better ransomware protection and ransomware recovery, and to meet your industry’s governance and compliance standards.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication makes it easy to manage and protect a growing virtual infrastructure. Use Policy-Based Data Protection to save time and minimize retention gaps. Instead of searching for each VM, instance or physical machine that you need to protect, you can set policies to schedule backups for multiple production machines from a centralized dashboard. Policies can be set according to several parameters, such as name, size and tag. This way, if you want only certain production machines to be backed up to Amazon S3, simply create a policy with unique parameters and let NAKIVO Backup & Replication take care of the rest.

You pay for each GB of data stored in Amazon S3. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can use incremental backups and compression to minimize backup sizes and hence pay less for storage. After an initial full backup, incremental backups only transfer changed blocks of data to the Amazon S3 backup repository. Use compression to shrink backup sizes even further, earning additional savings on storage. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers three compression levels: fast, medium and best. Choose the balance between speed and size that best fits your needs.

Switching between different data protection interfaces for each environment raises the chance for mistakes to happen and retention policy gaps to emerge. Instead, use NAKIVO Backup & Replication to send your backups to AWS S3, local devices and off-site storage locations. The intuitive, web-based UI lets you run backups and recoveries on any device, at any time, to any supported destination. All you have to do is create an Amazon S3 backup repository, choose the data you want to back up, select the backup destinations and run the backups.

During peak office hours, sending backups to AWS S3 may cause network congestion, preventing your business applications from running smoothly and affecting user experience. NAKIVO Backup & Replication includes advanced bandwidth throttling so that you can protect your data without sacrificing operational efficiency. This advanced feature lets you choose exactly how much bandwidth backups use on a per-job or global basis. Backups do not take more bandwidth than the limit you assign. If more bandwidth becomes available, you can speed up the backup job by raising the limit at any time.

Store VM backups and backup copies in Amazon S3 to ensure that your virtual infrastructure is protected. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports full VM recoveries for VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Amazon EC2. If you need to rapidly resume operations after a disruption, use Instant VM Recovery to boot VMware and Hyper-V VMs on target hosts directly from backups stored in Amazon S3. You do not have to restore the source machine first, significantly reducing RTOs. This recovery type also provides a quick and reliable method for creating testing and development environments.

Files and objects can be lost, deleted or corrupted at any time. Object and file level recoveries give you the capacity to quickly restore exactly what you need back to the original or custom location. Both recovery types restore items directly from compressed backups in Amazon S3 without running a full recovery, saving you time and resources. You can easily locate items by searching and browsing through backups using the Global Search feature. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports granular recoveries for Microsoft Exchange, SQL and Active Directory objects and common file system types.

To keep your data safe in any failure scenario, there’s nothing more reliable than the 3-2-1 backup rule. First, you should keep at least three copies of your data: your production data plus two backups. Second, store your data on at least two different storage media. Third, keep at least one copy of your data off-site, for example, in the cloud or on tape cartridges. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a perfect backup- to-Amazon-S3 software for implementing this three-pronged approach. This way you rest assured that your data remains available and recoverable even if you lose the other copies.

When performing multiple backups on a daily basis, schedule your backup jobs to avoid job overlaps and prevent network congestion. You can easily manage your schedule via Calendar Dashboard, the built-in functionality of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Calendar Dashboard provides you with a calendar view of all your past (including completed and stopped), running and planned jobs, which helps you easily find windows for scheduling your next jobs. Having set your backup jobs to start automatically at a specific time, you can minimize the need for manual intervention.

When compressing your backup data, you can decrease the space required for storing your backups, hence the associated cloud storage costs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers three compression levels. Fast offers the lowest compression capabilities and it is the fastest to perform. Fast doesn’t consume much CPU and provides sufficient space savings. Medium requires more CPU and saves more space than the Fast level. The Best compression level offers maximal space savings and requires more CPU resources and more time to run than the other levels.

Retention policy gaps are a common reason for data loss, which is why it is important to have both fresh backups for instant restores and data archives for regulatory and compliance purposes. Each successful backup session creates a recovery point you can roll back to, and the retention policy defines the number of recovery points you want to retain. NAKIVO Backup & Replication relies on the grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention scheme. This scheme allows you to save storage space while retaining the recovery points for any period that you need.

Create policy-based rules to automate backup jobs for your VMware and Hyper-V VMs and Amazon EC2 instances and save time on routine backup management. Policies can be based on the machine’s name, size, tag, location, etc. or a combination of these parameters. For example, you can create and run a backup job for VMs that are larger than 4 GB, have more than 2 CPUs and their names contain “Windows”. NAKIVO Backup & Replication regularly scans your infrastructure for changes. When a new VM matches the policies, it is automatically added to the corresponding job.

Always test your backups to make sure they are valid and you can use them for safe recoveries. The mere fact you have a backup does not guarantee that your data is recoverable. And the worst time to discover that a backup is corrupted is when it’s most needed. NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows you to instantly verify VMware and Hyper-V backups once the Backup to Amazon S3 job has completed by automatically launching the VM from the newly created backup, waiting for the OS to boot and taking a screenshot before discarding the test-recovered VM.

When it comes to meeting industry-specific retention requirements or implementing legal holds, your number one priority is ensuring that your backup data integrity and consistency is uncompromised during that period. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can meet the strictest compliance and governance retention standards by applying S3 Object Lock to your recovery points. This way your data is immutable and protected from ransomware and accidental deletion or modification. No third party or authorized user, not even a user with admin permissions, can shorten or modify the retention period.