Updated on 2025-08-05 GMT+08:00

Creating an Organizational Backup Policy

Organizations are complex, with numerous departments offering diverse services. Traditional backup policies often fail to meet efficiency and compliance requirements. Enterprises must establish unified, flexible, and compliant backup policies for all these departments.

For enterprises generating massive daily data, the organizational backup policy allows administrators to schedule full backups during off-peak hours and incremental backups during peak hours for each department, ensuring data integrity without disrupting daily operations. You can also create organization backup policies by region based on data storage regulations in different countries and precisely set parameters such as backup retention rules.

The organizational administrator or delegated administrator can create an organizational backup policy on the CBR console and set parameters such as the backup time, period, and retention rule. If this organizational backup policy is applied to a vault in an organization, the system automatically executes backup tasks at the specified time based on the policy.

This section describes how to create an organizational backup policy.

Constraints

  • You can apply backup policies to server backup vaults, SFS Turbo backup vaults, and disk backup vaults.
  • A backup policy must be enabled before it can be used to back up resources that are associated with vaults and periodically delete expired backups.
  • When both a backup time and a replication time are configured, ensure that replication starts after backup is complete. Otherwise, replication may fail.
  • When expired backups are deleted, automatic backups will be deleted, but manual backups will not.
  • Only servers in the Running or Stopped state can be backed up.
  • Only disks in the Available or In-use state can be backed up.
  • By default, the first backup is a full backup and all subsequent backups are incremental ones.
  • The minimum interval between two full backups is one day.

Procedure for Creating Organizational Policies

  1. Log in to the CBR console.

    1. Log in to the management console.
    2. Click in the upper left corner and select a region.
    3. Click and choose Storage > Cloud Backup and Recovery. Select the corresponding backup type from the navigation pane.

  2. Choose Organizational Policies in the navigation pane and click the Organizational Backup Policies tab. In the upper right corner, click Create Organizational Policy.

    Figure 1 Create Organizational Policy

  3. Set the backup policy parameters. Table 1 describes the parameters.

    Table 1 Backup policy parameters

    Parameter

    Description

    Example Value

    Organizational Policy Name

    Organizational policy name

    A name must contain 1 to 64 characters including digits, letters, underscores (_), or hyphens (-).

    org_policy

    Organizational Policy Description

    Description that can help the organization members to understand the usage of the policy.

    /

    Organizational Policy Type

    Select a policy type. In this section, we select Backup.

    Backup

    Policy Name

    Backup policy name You can enter a custom name or use the default name policy_xxxx.

    A name must contain 1 to 64 characters including digits, letters, underscores (_), or hyphens (-).

    backup_policy

    Status

    Whether to enable the backup policy.

    CBR backs up resources to vaults and deletes expired backups only after a backup policy is applied to the vaults.

    Enabled

    Backup Frequency

    Select a backup frequency. By default, the replication task is executed automatically every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

    • Weekly

      Specifies on which days of each week the backup task will be executed. You can select multiple days.

    • Day-based

      Specifies the interval (every 1 to 30 days) for executing the backup task.

    If you select day-based backup, the first backup is supposed to be executed on the day when the backup policy is created. If the execution time on the day you create the backup policy has passed, the first backup will be executed in the next backup cycle.

    It is recommended that backups be performed during off-peak hours or when no services are running.

    Every day

    Execution Time

    Execution times of the backup policy in a day The default backup time is 22:00.

    Backups can be scheduled at the beginning of each hour, and you can select multiple hours.

    It is recommended that backups be performed during off-peak hours or when no services are running.

    Backup service peak hours are from 00:00 to 06:00. During this time, scheduling delays may occur. To ensure optimal performance, it is recommended that you assess your service requirements and schedule backups outside peak hours.

    NOTE:
    • There may be a time difference between the scheduled backup time and the actual backup time.
    • If a large amount of data needs to be backed up, you are advised to make backup less frequent to prevent the system from skipping any execution time.

      For example, a disk is scheduled to be backed up at 00:00, 01:00, and 02:00. A backup task starts at 00:00. Because a large amount of incremental data needs to be backed up or a heap of backup tasks are executed at the same time, this backup task takes 90 minutes and completes at 01:30. CBR performs the next backup at 02:00. In this case, only two backups are generated in total, one at 00:00, and the other at 02:00.

    • The execution times refer to the local times of clients, not the time zone and times of the region.

    00:00, 02:00

    Full Backup

    Whether to perform periodic full backups. This function is disabled by default.

    • Enable

      Enabling full backup improves your data reliability, but full backups will use more storage space.

      Configure a full backup frequency. The value ranges from 0 to 100. Value 0 means that a full backup will be performed in every backup task.

    • Do not enable

      Periodic full backup will not be performed. Instead, CBR will always perform incremental backups after the first backup.

      NOTE:
      • A full backup usually takes a long period of time. If a full backup of a resource is in progress, other backups of this resource will not be performed. For example, any policy-based backups planned to be executed during a full backup will be skipped.
      • When backups are kept by quantity, full backups can be performed only when the full backup frequency configured is less than the number of retained backups.

    7

    Retention Rule

    Rule that specifies how backups will be retained By default, backup replicas are retained for one month.

    • Time period

      You can choose to retain backups for one month, three months, six months, one year, or for any desired number (2 to 99999) of days.

    • Backup quantity

      You can set the maximum number of backups to retain for each resource. The value ranges from 2 to 99999.

    • Advanced Options

      You can also set long-term retention rules with advanced options. Long-term retention rules and quantity-based retention rules will be both applied.

      • Day-based: 0–100
      • Weekly: 0–100
      • Monthly: 0–100
      • Yearly: 0–100

      A resource may be backed up multiple times in a day. If day-based backup is configured, only the most recent backup of that day is retained. If you set Day-based to 5, the most recent backup of each of the last five days that have backups generated will be retained and the earliest backups will be deleted automatically. If day-based, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention rules are all configured, all the rules will apply and the union set of backups will be retained. For example, if Day-based is set to 5 and Weekly to 1, five backups will be retained. The long-term retention rule and the quantity-based retention rule both apply.

    • Permanent
      NOTE:
      • The system automatically deletes the earliest and expired backups every other day to avoid exceeding the maximum number of backups to retain or retaining any backup longer than the maximum retention period.
      • Expired backups are not deleted right after they are expired. They will be deleted from 12:00 to 00:00 in batches.
      • The retention rules apply only to auto-generated backups, but not manual backups. Manual backups need to be deleted manually.
      • If a backup is used to create an image, the backup will not be deleted by the retention rule.
      • A maximum of 10 backups are retained for failed periodic backup tasks. They are retained for one month and can be deleted manually.

    6 months

    More frequent backups create more backups or retain backups for a longer time, protecting data to a greater extent but occupying more storage space. Set an appropriate backup frequency as needed.

  4. Click Create Now.

    After the backup policy is created, it will automatically appear in each member account's policy list. Users with the member accounts can view the created policies in Organizational Policies on the CBR console.

Follow-Up Operations