Backup plans overview

Backup plans are centralized management tools that allow you to define advanced backup strategies for your Google Cloud resources. By using a backup plan, you can automate when and how your data is protected, ensuring consistent recovery points across your infrastructure.

Backup plans are also referred to as backup policies. A key feature of the service is the capability for backup plan association to a workload to ensure consistent data protection.

Supported resource types

Backup plans support the following vaulted resources:

  • Compute Engine instances
  • Compute Engine disks
  • Cloud SQL instances
  • AlloyDB for PostgreSQL clusters
  • Filestore instances

Core components of a backup plan

This section details the important components of Backup and DR Service backup plans.

Backup rules

A backup plan consists of one or more backup rules that define the lifecycle of the backup. Multiple backup rules can be associated with a single backup plan. Attributes of backups plans are as follows:

  • Recurrence: Defines how often backups are taken
    • Hourly: Specify the frequency in hours
    • Daily: Backups occur once every day
    • Weekly: Select one or more specific days of the week
    • Monthly: Select a specific day of the month (e.g., the 1st or 15th)
    • Yearly: Backups occur once a year on a specified date
  • Constraint: No two backup rules within a plan can be created with the same backup frequency period
  • Backup Window: Defines the timeframe (in 24-hour format) during which the backup job must start
    • Duration: The window must be at least six hours long
    • Start Time: The earliest time the backup can begin
  • Retention: The number of days each backup created by this rule will be kept before it is eligible for deletion. Users have the ability to specify enforced retention at the backup-rule level

Maximum custom on-demand retention

This setting defines the maximum number of days an on-demand backup (created manually outside the automated schedule) can be retained. This prevents users from accidentally setting excessively long retention periods for manual snapshots.

Database log backups

For database resources (like Cloud SQL or AlloyDB), you can enable log backups within the backup plan. This allows for Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) by capturing transaction logs between full backup points.

Backup job retries

When a scheduled job fails, the scheduler automatically retries the job up to three more times.

  • First failure: Status marked "Retried"; waits 4 minutes.
  • Second failure: Next retry queued after 16 minutes.
  • Third failure: Final retry queued after 64 minutes.
  • Final failure: After 4 total attempts, status changes to "Failed". No further jobs are attempted for that schedule period.

Job retries are reported in Monitor > Jobs. To identify retries, all four jobs will share the same Job number with a unique suffix (e.g., Job_12345, Job_12345a, Job_12345b).

Data retention and storage management

The section details the important data retention and storage management features of Backup and DR backup plans.

Types of retention

  • Expiration-based Retention: The standard lifecycle where a backup is kept for the duration defined in the plan's rule and then automatically expired.
  • Enforced Retention: A security feature at the backup vault level. If a vault has "Prevent deletion for" enabled, backups cannot be deleted—even by an administrator—until this period has passed. This period can be longer than the rule's retention period.

Storage constraints

  • Vault Minimums: A backup plan's retention period cannot be shorter than the minimum retention period configured on the destination backup vault. The maximum custom on-demand retention period must be greater than or equal to the destination backup vault's minimum enforced retention period.
  • Immutability: Backups are immutable (cannot be modified or deleted) for the duration of the vault's enforced retention period.
  • Automatic Deletion: Once the retention period set in the backup plan expires (and any vault-level enforced retention is met), the service automatically deletes the backup to manage storage costs.
  • The maximum custom on-demand retention period must be greater than or equal to the destination backup vault's minimum enforced retention period.

Security and encryption: CMEK

  • Alignment Requirement: If a source workload is protected by Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK), the backup plan must point to a CMEK-enabled backup vault.
  • Standard Encryption: Resources using Google-owned and Google-managed encryption keys must be backed up to standard (non-CMEK) vaults.

Supported regions and zone separation

Backup plans are available in most major Google Cloud regions. However, certain regions don't support zone separation, meaning backups may not be stored in a different zone from the source:

  • North America: Montréal (northamerica-northeast1)
  • South America: Santiago (southamerica-west1)
  • Europe: Warsaw (europe-central2)
  • Middle East & Africa: Doha (me-central1), Johannesburg (africa-south1)
  • Asia Pacific: Osaka (asia-northeast2), Querétaro (northamerica-northeast2)

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