Db Backup Options (for Cloud DBs like Amazon ESB and GAE) [closed]

Question

What are db backup options for (offline):

1 - Amazon EC2

2 - GAE (Google App Engine)

Note: For example ESB (Amazon Elastic Block Store) provides differential snapshots which is great; and we can have backups in Amazon S3, which is great too. But I do not know if I can have latest version of my db, on my local machine.

Thanks

Answer 1

For App Engine, the bulkloader permits dumping and loading the entire datastore. Loading to a different instance that you dumped from is also possible, but currently requires manually setting the ID counters using allocate_ids so that they don't allocate already used IDs. Future versions of the SDK should support doing this automatically.

Asking about backing up EC2 doesn't make much sense - EC2 is for computation, not storage. If you mean one of the other services - S3, EBS, or SimpleDB, you need to specify which you mean.

Answer 2

You're quite right to ask about EC2 backup, as running SQL Server (for example) on there is a typical use case. It's normal practice to use Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) as the storage for the data files in that case, and EBS can easily be backed to by taking snapshots. However, if you have large and busy database, note that you will not be able to take a successful snapshot of the live data drive in a sensible amount of time. Instead, it's necessary to use a second EBS volume as a backup volume and do conventional database backups from the live volume to the backup volume. The snapshot of the backup volume can then run uncontended after the database backup is complete.

Answer 3

You can definitely set up EC2 to have easy and convenient snapshots of EBS volumes. The EBS volume can be up to 1TB. Check out this article for how to set up MySQL to use EBS: ec2ebs-mysql.notlong.com/ And this article for a script (and explanation) to create consistent snapshots of the EBS volume: alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot