Getting started with Backup and Recovery
IBM Cloud® Backup and Recovery is a managed service that provides backup solutions for various IBM Cloud® services and customer workloads running on IBM Cloud. In this getting started tutorial, you learn how to back up and recover a workload by using the IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery service.
Use code VPC1000 and get USD 1,000 in no-charge credits to use toward different offerings on IBM Cloud VPC, including: Confidential computing with Intel® SGX®, Bare Metal for VPC, IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery, or any Block and File storage or networking components. Valid until 31 December 2025.
Before you begin
You need the following to get started with IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery:
- An IBM Cloud® Platform account
- An active instance of IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery
- You need to start the dashboard of your backup service instance to create, manage, and monitor backup policies
Comparison of workload availability
| Workload | VPC VSI | VMware | Regions supported |
|---|---|---|---|
| File system | Yes | Yes | - North America: United States - Washington DC us-east, Dallas us-south, Canada - Toronto ca-tor- South America: Brazil - São Paulo br-sao- Europe: Europe - Frankfurt eu-de,
Europe - London eu-gb, Europe - Madrid eu-es- Asia: Japan - Tokyo jp-tok, Osakojp-osa- Australia - Sydney au-syd |
| MS SQL | Yes | Yes | - North America: United States - Washington DC us-east, Dallas us-south, Canada - Toronto ca-tor- South America: Brazil - São Paulo br-sao- Europe: Europe - Frankfurt eu-de,
Europe - London eu-gb, Europe - Madrid eu-es- Asia: Japan - Tokyo jp-tok, Osakojp-osa- Australia - Sydney au-syd |
| SAP HANA | Yes | Yes | - North America: United States - Washington DC us-east, Dallas us-south, Canada - Toronto ca-tor- South America: Brazil - São Paulo br-sao- Europe: Europe - Frankfurt eu-de,
Europe - London eu-gb, Europe - Madrid eu-es- Asia: Japan - Tokyo jp-tok, Osakojp-osa- Australia - Sydney au-syd |
| Oracle | No | Yes | - North America: United States - Washington DC us-east, Dallas us-south, Canada - Toronto ca-tor- South America: Brazil - São Paulo br-sao- Europe: Europe - Frankfurt eu-de,
Europe - London eu-gb, Europe - Madrid eu-es- Asia: Japan - Tokyo jp-tok, Osakojp-osa- Australia - Sydney au-syd |
Selecting an instance and opening the main menu
- Start by searching for IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery in the IBM Cloud catalog, and select your IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery storage instance from the resource list that is found under the navigation menu.
- Click your instance from the list to open the main page.
- Showing on the main page are the details of the information that you provided when creating a IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery instance. From this page you can take more actions like rename, start dashboard for setting up your environment and configuring protection, view logging, view monitoring and delete this instance. Additional information is shown for the API details like your ID and endpoints.
- Click view in the Logging window to load your Logs Routing targets, or click Manage routing to define rules to collect and send platform logs to a Cloud Logs instance.
- Click view in the Monitoring window to load your Metrics Routing targets, or click Manage routing to define your IBM Cloud Metrics Routing settings.
Setting up your environment for Backup and Recovery
To get started, you need to complete the following steps in the dashboard.
- Create backup service connector for virtual machines to move data between your sources and the Backup service.
- Download and install the backup agents onto the servers you want to back up.
- NOTE: Create a VM to be used as a backup service connector for virtual machines to move data between your sources and the IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery service.
- Register sources to define the types of applications on those servers.
Configuring protection
To get started, you need to complete the following steps in the dashboard.
- Create backup policies as needed.
- Choose the registered sources to protect.
Next steps
Now that you are familiar with your IBM Cloud Backup and Recovery instance from the web-based console, you might be interested in doing a similar workflow from the command line. Check out using the ibmcloud backup-recovery command-line
utility to create a service instance and interacting with IAM. And you can further use curl for accessing Cloud Object Storage directly. Check out the API overview to get started.