Initiating DRS automatic backups

After you configure the external storage in ECS, you can initiate the Data Recovery Service (DRS) automatic backups using the “updateAutoBackupPolicy” CDP CLI command. Alternatively, you can edit the “automatic-backup” (a Kubernetes cron job) to initiate the DRS automatic backups.

The preferred method to initiate the DRS automatic backups is to use the updateAutoBackupPolicy CDP CLI command in the CDP client. For more information about DRS CDP CLI commands, see CLI reference for using DRS on Control Plane.

The following steps show an alternate method to initiate DRS automatic backups using kubectl commands.

Run the kubectl edit cj automatic-backup -n cdp-drs command.
Configure the ENABLED environment variable to true to enable automatic backups, configure the namespaces (if they are not configured), and then configure the backup retain count to take backups on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. You can also choose a combination of two or more periods to take backups. Save the cron job.
The backup retain count determines the number of backup instances to generate.
important
If you do not want to set a backup for a particular period, ensure that the count is set to 0. This is because the retain count is set to 1 (minimum backup retain count) by default.
DRS generates n+1 backups by default where n is the backup retain count. Therefore, the minimum number of backups at any point in time is 2 by default. For example, if you set the HOURLY_COUNT parameter to 2, three instances are generated; therefore, two backups are taken every hour. If you set the WEEKLY_COUNT parameter to 0, no instances are created and no backups are generated.
The following sample snippet shows the environment variables required for DRS automatic backups:
```
env:
 - name: ENABLED
 value: "true"
 - name: HOURLY_COUNT
 value: "1"
 - name: DAILY_COUNT
 value: "1"
 - name: WEEKLY_COUNT
 value: "1"
```

By default, Kubernetes initiates the first automatic backup within 30 minutes after the backup policy creation is complete.

Backup instances, depending on the chosen schedules, are generated and appear on the CDP Private Cloud Data Services Management Console > Dashboard > Backup Overview > View Details > Backup and Restore Manager > Backups tab. The instance name is auto-generated. Click the backup instance to view more details.