Backups at Aiven#

This article provides information on general rules for handling service backups in Aiven. It also covers service-specific backup details, such as backup frequency and retention period per service. Learn about our backup-restore strategies for powering-off/on services and find out if Aiven allows accessing backups.

About backups at Aiven#

All Aiven services, except for Apache Kafka® and M3 Aggregator/Coordinator, have time-based backups that are encrypted and securely stored. The backup retention times vary based on the service and the selected service plan. Backups we take for managing the service are not available for download for any service type as they are compressed and encrypted by our management platform.

Service power-off/on backup policy#

Whenever a service is powered on from a powered-off state, we restore the latest backup available.

We review any services that are powered off for longer than 180 days. We will send you a notification email in advance to take action before we perform house cleaning and delete the service and backup as part of periodic cleanup of powered-off services. If you would still like to keep the powered off service for longer than 180 days, you can avoid this routine cleanup by powering on the service and then powering it back off.

Backup profile per service#

Depending on the service plan, each service provides different backups with different retention periods. Check out the hourly and daily backups with the number of days of retention provided in the table.

Service type	Backup retention time based on service Plan
Service type	Hobbyist	Startup	Business	Premium
Aiven for Apache Kafka®	No backups	No backups	No backups	No backups
Aiven for PostgreSQL® / MySQL	Single backup only for disaster recovery	2 days with PITR	14 days with PITR	30 days with PITR
Aiven for OpenSearch®	Single backup only for disaster recovery	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 3 days	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 14 days	Hourly backup for 24 hours and Daily backup for 30 days
Aiven for Apache Cassandra®	Plan not available	Single day backup	Single day backup	Single day backup
Aiven for Redis®*	Single backup only for disaster recovery	Backup every 12 hours up to 1 day	Backup every 12 hours up to 3 days	Backup every 12 hours up to 13 days
Aiven for InfluxDB®	Plan not available	Backup every 12 hours up to 2.5 days	Plan not available	Plan not available
Aiven for Apache Flink®	Plan not available	Hourly backup up to 2 hours	Hourly backup up to 2 hours	Plan not available
Aiven for M3	Plan not available	Single day backup	Daily backup up to 6 days	Daily backup up to 13 days
Aiven for M3 Aggregator / Coordinator	Plan not available	Plan not available	No backups	No backups
Aiven for Grafana®	Plan not available	Backup every 1 hour up to 1 day	Plan not available	Plan not available
Aiven for ClickHouse®	Daily backups up to 2 days	Daily backups up to 2 days	Daily backups up to 14 days	Daily backups up to 30 days

There are specific backup strategies for particular service types.

Aiven for Apache Kafka®#

Aiven for Apache Kafka is usually used as a transport tool for data rather than a permanent store and the way it stores data doesn’t really allow reasonable backup to be implemented using traditional backup strategies. Hence, Aiven doesn’t take backups for managed Apache Kafka services and data durability is determined by the replication of data across the cluster.

To back up data passing through Kafka, we recommend using one of the following tools:

MirrorMaker 2 to replicate the data to another cluster, which could be an Aiven service or a Kafka cluster on your own infrastructure. Using MirrorMaker 2, the backup cluster is running as an independent Kafka service, so you have complete freedom of choice in which zone to base the service.

Note

MirrorMaker 2 provides tools for mapping between the source and target offset, so you don’t need to make this calculation. For more details, see section Offset Mapping in blog post A look inside Kafka MirrorMaker 2.
Kafka Connect to backup the cluster, for instance, sinking data from Apache Kafka® to S3 via a dedicated Aiven connector.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for PostgreSQL®#

For Aiven for PostgreSQL, full daily backups are taken and WAL segments are constantly archived to the cloud object storage. In case of node failure,

For a business or premium plan, Aiven can reconstruct the latest state from a replica
For a startup plan, Aiven can reconstruct the latest state from the latest base backup and replay the latest WAL segments on top of that.

You can supplement this with a remote read replica service, which you can run in a different cloud region or with another cloud provider and promote to master if needed.

To shift the backup schedule to a new time, you can modify the backup time configuration option in Advanced Configuration in the Aiven console. If there has been a recent backup taken, it may take another backup cycle before the new backup time takes effect.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for MySQL®#

Aiven for MySQL databases are automatically backed up with full daily backups and binary logs recorded continuously. All backups are encrypted with the open source myhoard software. Myhoard uses Percona XtraBackup internally for taking full (or incremental) snapshots for MySQL.

See also

For more information, refer to MySQL Backups.

Aiven for OpenSearch®#

Aiven for OpenSearch databases are automatically backed up, encrypted, and stored securely in the object storage. The backups are taken every hour and the retention period varies based on the service plan.

See also

For more information, refer to

Aiven for Apache Cassandra®#

Aiven for Apache Cassandra backups are taken every 24 hours. The point-in-time recovery (PITR) feature is currently not available.

Note

If you’d like to be notified once the PITR feature is available for Cassandra, contact the Aiven support.

Aiven for Redis™*#

Aiven for Redis backups are taken every 12 hours.

For persistence, Aiven supports Redis Database Backup (RDB).

You can control the persistence feature using redis_persistence under Advanced Configuration in the Aiven console:

When redis_persistence is set to rdb, Redis does RDB dumps every 10 minutes if any key is changed. Also, RDB dumps are done according to the backup schedule for backup purposes.
When redis_persistence is off, no RDB dumps or backups are done, so data can be lost at any moment if the service is restarted for any reason or if the service is powered off. This also means the service can’t be forked.

Note

AOF persistence is currently not supported by the Aiven for the managed Redis service.

Aiven for InfluxDB®#

Aiven for InfluxDB backups are taken every 12 hours with 2.5 days of retention. InfluxDB® is automatically backed up, encrypted, and uploaded to the Aiven’s S3 account in the same region. When an instance has to be rebuilt, the backup is downloaded and restored to create a new instance.

Aiven for ClickHouse®#

Aiven for ClickHouse® provides automatic daily backups. The Astacus backup manager for distributed databases runs on all nodes to coordinate backups of cluster databases.

Each file to be backed up is encrypted, compressed, and uploaded to an object storage (Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage) in the same region.

Aiven for ClickHouse backups contain database lists, table schemas, table content, and access entities (such as users or roles). They are backed up incrementally: files already present in the object storage are not re-uploaded and only changed parts are backed up.

Note

Aiven for ClickHouse doesn’t support so-called streaming backups: when a service is powered off, all data written after the last backup gets lost. For more information about limitations on Aiven for ClickHouse backups, see Aiven for ClickHouse limitations.

See also

For more information on Aiven for ClickHouse backups, see Backup and restore.

Access to backups#

The Aiven platform provides a centralised managed platform for Aiven services to run across many different cloud providers and regions. Tooling that built to provide the service backups are open source and available for you to use in your own infrastructure.

The nature of the Aiven platform is to manage the operational tasks of running complex software at scale so that you are able to focus your efforts on using the services, not maintaining them. Aiven takes care of service availability, security, connectivity, and backups.

Access to backups of your services is not possible. The backups are encrypted and stored in the object storage. If you do need to backup your service, you can use the standard tooling for this service.

Recommended backup tools per service are as follows:

PostgreSQL: pgdump
MySQL: mysqldump
Redis: redis-cli
Cassandra: cqlsh
OpenSearch: elasticdump
InfluxDB: influxd

Note

The listed backup tools are merely recommendations and are not intended to create a snapshot of your Aiven service but to provide access to the data.