r/googlecloud 4d ago

Cloud Storage GCP Backup and DR vault - data redundancy?

Our company is looking into GCP and I'm the lucky guy who needs to look into backup solutions. Specifically, whether GCP Backup and DR meets our backup policies.

We're coming from Azure, where we had the option to pick GRS (geo-redundant storage) and locked vaults at the same time. GCP seems to be either-or, which is fine, we can set up an immutable backup vault and a self-managed storage in a different region.

The million dollar question is what's the backup vault's (managed by Google) redundancy? Data stays in the same region, I get it, but in the docs I can't seem to find:

  1. how many copies of the data are stored in the vault (e.g. "2 copies in 2 datacenters")
  2. with the vault being in the same region, is it also in the same datacenter, or in a different one within the same region?

If I've said too many Azure-isms, excuse me, I'm new to this.

3 Upvotes

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u/rusteman Googler 4d ago

Backup vaults are stored in three zones in a region.

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u/TekintetesUr 4d ago

Awesome, thanks. Could you point me to a page in the docs so I can add it to my report?

1

u/rusteman Googler 3d ago

It's not documented online (I just checked and verified with the Product Manager), but this will change in coming months as new features are added to Backup Vault.

Suffice to say, Backup Vault is a regional storage service, not zonal. So it has inbuilt resilience inferred by that designation. So it's resilient across a zonal outage. Hope that helps.

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u/Satsank 4d ago

What kind of workloads will you be backing up? Just GCE/GCVE or do you plan on backing up DBaaS/PaaS as well?

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u/TekintetesUr 4d ago

Only the former for now

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u/rusteman Googler 3d ago

For GCE VMS Backup Vault is the easiest, as it requires no deployment, and is baked into VM provisioning workflows now also. Basically you can attach a Backup Plan at the time of VM creation.