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Backup Service

Data protection for your Linode

Managed Backups

You do have backups, right? Yeah, we thought so. Backups are a good thing, but they're tedious to configure and monitor. We've all heard the stories (and possibly experienced them) about some poor soul losing valuable data because the time wasn't invested in a working backup system — or worse, false security was placed in a backup system that was unreliable.

Given how critical backups are, our goal for the Linode Backup Service was ambitious: to create a completely managed, reliable and highly available system, that's easy to use (set-it-and-forget-it), affordable, and "just works".

One click is all it takes to enroll your Linode in the backup service and to start protecting your data. We manage the entire system, from making sure our backup boxes are healthy, to monitoring for failures. We've done the hard work so you don't have to. What's your data worth?

Enroll Now!

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Service Overview

The Linode Backup Service is designed to be an easy to use, simple and reliable on-site backup solution for your Linode. It performs backups without causing any interruption of your running system, and is seamlessly integrated into the Linode Manager.

There are four backup slots: Three of the slots are executed and rotated automatically: a daily backup, a 2-7 day old backup, and an 8-14 day old backup. The fourth backup slot is a user-initiated snapshot and remains in place until another user-initiated snapshot is taken.

You can configure the time upon which the automatic backups are initiated from a list of 2 hour windows — you'll want to perform any database dumps before this window. You can also configure which day of the week to consider for the weeklies.

You can restore a backup to any of the Linodes attached to your account, even if it does not have backups enabled. Currently only a full restore is possible.

Limitations

The backup system must be able to mount your disk images on the host. If you've used fdisk on your images to create partitions, or created encrypted volumes, or LVM, or done anything other than use our deployment or disk image creation tools, we won't be able to back up the data. The backup system operates on files, not at the block level.

A failed backup will never rotate out a good one. If a backup fails on the day of a weekly backup, the next oldest backup will be used for that weekly slot.

Files that have been modified, but are the same length and without any metadata changes (like mtime) will not be considered "changed" during a subsequent incremental backup. Currently, only ext2/3 volumes can be backed up (this limitation may be removed in an upcoming release). ACLs and extended attributes are NOT tracked.