Backup and Restoration Overview

Backups

Cloud Clusters backups are point-in-time filesystem-level snapshots. Snapshots are an instantaneous "picture" of your server's file system at a certain period of time. This picture captures the entire file system as it was when the snapshot is taken. When a snapshot is used to restore the server, the server will revert to exactly how it was at the time of the snapshot.

Cloud Clusters automates the process of backing up your GitLab. The backup frequency vary based on the plan and we practice different types of snapshots. Regarding our backup strategy, you should know the following things:

Type of Snapshot:

• A full snapshot holds a full copy of the cluster data at a given point of time. By default, data of all the caches will be stored in a snapshot.
• An incremental snapshot is a copy of the data that contains only that portion that has changed since the preceding full or incremental snapshot copy. When a full recovery is needed, the restoration process needs the last full snapshot, plus all the incremental snapshots up to the point of restoration.

Scheduled Backup

We provide daily backup as an add-on. If you would like to upgrade to daily backup, please refer to the guide. And our daily backup service comes with a different approach for backup retention.

On-demand backup

Besides scheduled backups, we also support on-demand backups. If you need to take a full system snapshot manually, please see taking a system snapshot. Each backup file will be restored for 30 days on our platform. If you’d like to save it for a longer time, you can download it to your local machine.

Restoration

You can restore your GitLab to the state that the selected snapshot captured. The Restoration can be easily taken in our Control Panel. If you need help on the operation, please take a look at restoring a system backup.