Restore AWS EC2 instance using Nimesa

In the previous blog, we saw how to use Nimesa to protect the data at a periodic interval that meets organizations SLA needs. Protecting the environment is just one part of the story, a company needs a different level of restore options for different scenarios. Manual restore of data is not impossible in AWS but it’s very time-consuming. IT admin needs to find the associated volumes and find the snapshot, create volume from the snapshot and recover the data. Once it’s done he also needs to delete the unused volumes so it does not add to the cost.  The whole process can be automated but IT admin needs to write a script and also maintain the script. Restore also involves different scenarios which you will be seeing below.

Here are some of the scenario encountered by the organization when they have to restore

  • One straightforward scenario is the whole instance got deleted or entered into an undesired state user needs to restore the whole instance.
  • One of the EBS volumes got corrupted. In this case, an admin would like to quickly replace the volume with a volume from a stable snapshot
  • Few files got corrupted (Like database files, which are big in size) where he would like to recover back those files. In this  admin would like to have the volume from the consistent snapshot presented to the EC2 instance where he can use the native tools to restore the files/applications

Let us see how Nimesa can help in restoring the above scenarios and get the restore completed in Minutes.

In Nimesa, select the backup group and select the appropriate backup select “Restore” option

Full Instance Restore:

Select Full restore option and proceed with the restoration. This will restore the volumes from the snapshot and delete the original detached volumes. Additionally, you can enable postscripts and execute scripts in the instance once the volumes are restored and attached with the instance

 

Single Volume Restore:

For cases where only single-volume needs to be replaced by the volume from the snapshot select volume restore. Nimesa catalogs all the EBS volumes that are associated with an EC2 instance as part of every backup. We can pick the volumes from the list that needs to be restored.

Side by Side Volume Restore:

In case, where the user wanted to manually restore the files within the EC2 instance they can opt for Volume Mount capability where a new volume is cloned from the Snapshot and attached to the instance. This option will add cost post manual restore the cloned volume needs to be deleted.

About Nimesa

Nimesa is an enterprise-class Application Aware data protection & copy data management Solution for applications running on AWS. It uses native AWS capabilities like EBS snapshots capabilities to automatically protect the environment. Nimesa provides simple policy based lifecycle management of snapshots and clones of EC2 instances