Regarding incremental backup of Cloud SQL instances in Cloud GCP

[zzkunald]

Hi Team,

We came to know from Veeam Support agent from Case #07476423 that the forever forward incremental backup method is not fully implemented for Cloud SQL instances in Veeam Backup for GCP.

Can you please ask your QA Team to add this enhancement in upcoming version as soon as possible?

This would also help in reducing the time it takes for the backup and also in avoiding the failure in snapshots due to ongoing backup (due to the snapshot failure(s), 30 mins RTO DR is not met, at times).

Note: On going issue: Veeam Support - Case # 07363341 - Veeam backup of some (huge) cloudsql Instances fail

Veeam Support Case #07476423

Regards,
Kunal Dogra

[Alec King]

Hello Kunal,

I've looked into your support case, and it seems the limitations are in the pg_dump utility that we use to extract Postgres databases in order to back them up.
This utility does not support any kind of incremental data export, so each backup must extract a full copy of the database. Therefore forever forward incremental is not possible for Cloud SQL databases at the moment.
The pg_dump utility is currently the best method available to us for a stable and reliable export of the database - however we are always looking for improved APIs and tools to improve performance, should better integration become available we will investigate it.

For the moment, I see you support case is ongoing, and you will be performing some manual tests of pg_dump. We will watch this case together with our support team and review the results.

Regards,

[zzkunald]

Hi Alec,

Just to avoid confusion, Google documentation is pointing out that incremental backup possible in their native tool. Can't this feature be incorporated in Veeam backup for GCP.

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postg ... ry/backups.

Regards,
Kunal

[Alec King]

Hi Kunal,

In fact Google use the term 'backups' when actually they are referring to snapshots. You can see that Google 'backups' are actually storage snapshots in their documentation where they say After an instance is deleted, Cloud SQL deletes all backups. This is because when you delete a VM or CloudSQL instance, you also delete its snapshots.

Veeam Backup offers both snapshots AND true backups (to a Veeam repository) to provide increased protection.

By default Veeam Backup for Google will take scheduled storage snapshots, which are the 'incremental backups' described by Google. However in Veeam you can choose to also enable backups, and then you select a Veeam repository and we export all databases, and the CloudSQL configuration. This is a true backup which allows you to restore everything, instance and data, and is not affected in any way by deletion of the source instance.

You can run snapshots and backups in separate policy schedules to avoid conflicts, however the backup process (export to cloud storage) still requires to take a snapshot and then export the data. If this process takes too long and conflicts with the next scheduled snapshot, then you may need a more flexible schedule or some automation; or if the required RPOs are very strict then you may consider a move to Google's Cloud Spanner; this is postgres-based and supports clustering/replication and may perform better for the large instances in your case. Veeam Backup for Google does also natively support Cloud Spanner SQL snapshot and backup too

Hope that helps!

[zzkunald]

Hi Alec,

Thanks for replying and giving detailed explanation. But in future releases is it possible to have incremental true backups of Cloud SQL instances in Cloud GCP?

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Kunal