On Sun, Mar 8, 2020, 5:55 PM Alfredo De Luca <alfredo.deluca@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Sean. Sorry for the late reply.
What we want to do is backing up snapshots in case of a complete compute lost of as a plan for disaster recovery.
So after recreating the environment we can restore snapshots and start the VMs again.

Cheers

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 10:14 PM Sean McGinnis <sean.mcginnis@gmx.com> wrote:
On 3/4/20 9:58 AM, Gorka Eguileor wrote:
> On 03/03, Alfredo De Luca wrote:
>> Hi all.
>> We have our env with Openstack (Train) and cinder with CEPH (nautilus)
>> backend.
>> We are creating automatic volumes snapshots and now we'd like to export
>> them as a backup/restore plan. After exporting the snapshots we will use
>> Acronis as backup tool.
>>
>> I couldn't find the right steps/commands to exports the snapshots.
>> Any info?
>> Cheers
>>
>> --
>> *Alfredo*
> Hi Alfredo,
>
> What kind of backup/restore plan do you have planned?
>
> Because snapshots are not meant to be used in a Disaster Recovery
> backup/restore plan, so the only thing available are the manage/unmanage
> commands.
>
> These commands are meant to add an existing volume/snapshots into Cinder
> together, not to unmanage/manage them independently.
>
> For example, you wouldn't be able to manage a snapshot if the volume is
> not already managed. Also unmanaging the snapshot would block the
> deletion of the RBD volume itself.
>
> Cheers,
> Gorka.

If the intent is to use the snapshots as a source to backup the volume
data, leaving the actual volume attached and IO running but still
getting a "static" view of the code, then you would need to create a
volume from the chosen snapshot, mount that volume somewhere that is
accessible to your backup software, perform the copy of the data, then
delete the volume when complete.

I haven't used Acronis myself, but the issue for some backup software
could be that the volume it is backing up from is going to be different
every time. Though you could make sure it is mounted at the same place
so the backup software at least *thinks* it's backing up the same thing.

Then restoring the data will likely require some manual intervention,
but that's pretty much always the case when something goes wrong. I
would just recommend you test the full disaster recovery scenario to
make sure you have that figured out and working right before you
actually need it.

Sean

--
Alfredo

Is there a reason not to use the cinder backup feature? This function works for me backing up ceph volumes to swift. Once the backup is in swift it's very easy to pull it down to replicate it somewhere else. There are also other backup targets using the built in provider.

It's worth checking out.

Donny Davis
c: 805 814 6800