VMware backups

Backups are accomplished automatically once you apply a policy to the VM. The policy determines the frequency of the backup, and how long the backup is retained. Refer to [VMware policies](VMware policies.html) for more information about policy best practices, the hierarchy used when applying policies to VMs, and configuring policies. Here you will find instructions on how to do the following:

• Create a policy
• Delete a policy
• Change or remove a policy on a VM

Backup expiration and cleanup

When backups expire, the cloud resources associated with them are deleted. No new operations such as file level indexing (FLI), file level restores (FLR) or other restores for incremental backups are allowed for an expired backup. However, if there are any ongoing operations, they will continue to consume data source resources, even though they belong to an expired backup.

Clumio includes a feature that intelligently determines when a backup has expired, and then proceeds to permanently delete it, freeing up resources and eliminating unnecessary costs.

This backup expiry feature is triggered when the catalog service determines that the retention period of a backup has expired. Once the service identifies this, it sends a message to mark the backup as expired, meaning that you can no longer use it for restores and Clumio removes it from the system.

Note: No recovery tasks can be started once a backup has been marked expired. If a restore is actively running, Clumio will wait for it to complete before marking it as expired. In addition, no backup resources will be deleted if they are associated with other active backups.

Clumio expiry is transparent to you and other users and will continue running (retrying) as long as there are backups that have not been marked as deleted or are in the process of being deleted.

Note>: File Level Indexing (FLI) for VM backups does not fully support international character sets for POSIX filesystems (ext4/ext3/btrfs/xfs). This may result in a garbled display of some characters while browsing file indexes.

Take an on-demand backup

If you have configured a policy to support on-demand backups, you can start an immediate backup of the protected vCenter group. If there is a current backup underway, the on-demand backup request sends an alert, and the On-Demand backup starts after the current backup is complete.

1. Go to VMware > vCenters > [vCenter IP address or FQDN]>VMs, and select the VM you want to do an on-demand backup for.
2. Click Take On-Demand Backup. A one-time back up of the VM begins immediately.
3. The backup task displays as an on-demand backup in the list of protected data sources.