About backups

This page describes what a backup is, how it works, some common use cases and best practices when creating and using backups.

What is a backup?

A Filestore backup is a differential copy of a file share that includes all file data and metadata of the file share from the point in time when the backup is created. Backups are regional resources that remain within the region that you specify at the time of creation. You can create backups in the same region as the Filestore instance or to another region to help reduce the risk of data loss.

After creating a backup of a file share, you can modify or delete the original file share without affecting the backup.

You can use a backup to restore a file share to a new Filestore instance or, for basic tier instances, to the source of an existing file share.

Backups are globally addressable and can be used to restore file shares to any region .

Use cases

Use backups for the following scenarios:

• Disaster recovery: Schedule backups to a remote region to protect against regional outages. You can restore data to a new instance in any supported location.
• Data protection: Use scheduled backups to protect your data against accidental changes or data loss. You can restore a backup to a new instance to recover specific files, or perform an in-place restore to the original instance.
• Development and testing: Create clones of production data for testing, development, or offline analysis without impacting production performance.

Supported tiers

The following table shows the Filestore service tiers that support backups, encryption, and related restore operations:

Tier	Backups support	restore to new instance	restore to existing instance	restore to source instance	CMEK support
Basic HDD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Basic SSD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Zonal	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Regional	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Enterprise	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes

Backup options

Filestore offers the following backup options:

• Standard backups: Filestore creates, manages, and stores standard backups in the same project as your Filestore instances..
• Enhanced backups: Backup and DR Service stores and manages backups. This is a centralized, managed backup service that offers advanced features for data protection and management.

The following table shows the differences between standard and enhanced backups:

Feature	Standard backups	Enhanced backups
Backup management	Filestore	Backup and DR Service
Tier availability	Basic , Zonal, Regional, Enterprise	Zonal, Regional, Enterprise
Backup scheduling	No	Yes
Backup secured against unauthorized deletion or changes	-	Immutable and indelible backups through backup vault
Automated backup frequency	-	Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
On-demand backup retention	Retained indefinitely until manually deleted	Retained until expired (by a backup rule) or manually deleted
Backups protected against source project deletion	-	✔
Centralized backup management across resources and projects	-	✔
Long-term (>1 year) backup retention	-	✔
Backups protected against source instance deletion	✔	✔
Customer-managed encryption (CMEK)	✔	Planned
Multi-regional backups	✔	Planned
Cross-region backups	✔	Planned

Back up a file share

Backed up data include all the file system data and metadata. Filestore backups don't include file locks and certain instance-specific information . The following table shows what instance information backups preserve and what information they don't:

Preserved	Not preserved
Instance ID	Description
Tier of the source instance	Location
Capacity	Network
File share name	IP address
	IP-based access controls
	File locks
	Lock state
	Snapshots

Backup deletion

Backups are project-level resources, not a sub-resource of the source instance, and require their own separate storage. As a result, a backup's lifecycle is not tied to that of the source instance. Deleting the source does not delete its associated backups. If you want to delete a backup, you must explicitly perform a delete operation on the backup, not the instance.

Be sure to delete any unwanted backups. If a source instance is deleted, any remaining backups continue to accrue fees.

Deleting a backup is permanent and can't be undone. If the deletion of a backup fails, the status is marked as invalid . In such case, retry the delete operation.

Backup consistency

Filestore backups have NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 consistency semantics. Before a backup is initiated, any write that the Filestore instance acknowledges as written to stable storage or that is followed by an acknowledged COMMIT is included in the backup. For details, see NFSv3 RFC-1813 section 3.3.7 or About supported file system protocols .

Pricing

Network transfer charges apply to cross-region network traffic. For details, see the Pricing page.

Quota

A quota limit exists regarding the number of backups per region for basic SSD and basic HDD service tiers.

Backup quota limits don't apply to zonal, regional, and enterprise service tiers.

For more information, see Service tiers and quota .

What's next

• Learn about backup limitations
• Learn how to create standard backups .
• Read about best practices for creating backups
• Learn how to restore data
• Learn how to create standard and enhanced backups.