Disaster recovery and backup

IBM Cloud® Data Engine is deprecated. As of 18 February 2024 you can't create new instances, and access to free instances will be removed. Existing Standard plan instances are supported until 18 January 2025. Any instances that still exist on that date will be deleted.

Data Engine stores information about submitted jobs, such as SQL statements, job status, job IDs, and database catalog information like table and views. If a disaster occurs, the regular backups ensure that no more than 24 hours of data are at risk of loss. Backups are done automatically, so no action is required on your side.

The job results are stored in IBM Cloud® Object Storage and are independent of any Data Engine disaster recovery.

If a region becomes unavailable due to a disaster, the IBM Cloud® team works to get the region available again. You can route your workload to a different region by creating a new instance in an available region. In case you worked with tables or views, you must create those tables in the new instance and region again. Indexes are still available, if they are saved in available buckets, such as cross region buckets, but you must set the corresponding base location. Depending on the location and size of your data, it is possible that the jobs take longer.

Until recovery completes, you cannot use your instances that were created in the affected location. When data recovery completes, job history is available for the instances again.