One of the cool use features in N2WS Backup and Recovery is the ability to automate adding your EC2 instances to your backup policies. By leveraging tags this allows you to launch EC2 instances and assign them specific tags and never worry about those instances being protected. This works across AWS accounts too. Whats makes this even easier is when your using something like cloud formation to deploy anything in EC2 you can just have these tags propagated immediately.
Lets take a quick look at how we do this.
First we need to make sure that N2WS Backup and Recovery is configured for tag scanning. This is really simple. Go to General Settings
Locate Tag Scan and turn Scan Resources to Enabled
You can specify how long the scan interval is. Default is 6 hours.
Once you have this configured, you need to define the tags in EC2. How this works is by adding a tag name and then giving that tag a value which is the same as the policy name in N2WS. For example, in this illustration I have a policy defined called nvirgina_veeam . I need to create a tag key name called cpm backup and give it a value of nvirgina_veeam. Every tag needs to be called cpm backup for N2WS to detect that it needs to configure a value.
Once the tags are defined, N2WS Backup and Recovery will scan all the resources (based on the interval defined above) and allocate them as backup targets in the specified policy. In this case nvirgina_veeam.
Once your policies are defined, it is really easy to automate the addition of instances into the required backup policies. Automation, Automation, Automation.
I have listed some good follow up articles to read on how this works, and especially how you can leverage Cloud Formation to protect your cloud instances.
Backup Your AWS Cloud Environment Using CloudFormation
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