Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped supports the ability to take disk-level snapshots and complete virtual machine (VM) backups to facilitate disaster recovery.
Planning
You must have sufficient capacity to back up workload data, given the size of the data and its retention period. GDC provides backup capabilities for customer workloads to compatible object storage buckets.
These backups are not incremental, so the storage housing the backups must have enough capacity to hold full backups for the given backup frequency and retention periods. For example, a daily backup with a retention period of 365 days requires 365 times the storage capacity to hold a single backup. You also need to account for growth of the data being backed up to ensure the backups don't exceed the storage capacity.
If you are planning on using object storage on a remote GDC instance, you must create the storage buckets within the same organization on the target instance where the workloads are running in the source instance, so billing functions correctly. The organization control plane on one GDC instance must be backed up into buckets hosted in the same organization on another instance. You can also create buckets for backing up workloads in the same organization on the control plane backup instance.
You must also have sufficient capacity such as compute and storage to run any failed workloads on a separate GDC instance that you want to be able to restore to in the case of a disaster. For example, if you have two GDC instances and you want to be able to run all workloads while only one of the instances is available, the capacity of both instances individually must be greater than or equal to the overall capacity needed to run all of the workloads. However, if only some workloads must be recovered during a system failure, your planning can include temporarily shutting down less critical applications to free up resources until the failing systems are functioning again.
Backup and Restore
The following sections navigate to other guides on how to set up backups and perform restores for GDC.
Kubernetes workloads
To configure automatic backups to save your cluster workloads, see Install backup and restore components and follow the steps.
Virtual machines
To create the storage elements and configuration for automatic backups, see Planning VM backups.
To use your existing backup plans to make a manual backup, see Backup virtual machines.
To manually backup persistent disks to maintain relevant workload information, see Backup disks.