How to Back Up and Restore EC2 Instances with Vinchin Backup & Recovery

Learn how to back up and restore an EC2 instance with Vinchin Backup & Recovery. Our AWS Support team is here to answer queries and concerns.

How to Back Up and Restore EC2 Instances with Vinchin Backup & Recovery

AWS Backup is the go-to solution for many businesses when it comes to ensuring data protection and business continuity in the cloud.

However, if you are looking for more advanced features, cross-platform recovery, and a unified backup strategy across multiple environments, Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a powerful alternative.

Today, we will explore how Vinchin Backup & Recovery complements AWS Backup, walk through the steps to back up and restore EC2 instances, and highlight the key benefits of both solutions.

AWS Backup: A Quick Overview

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that helps automate and centralize data protection across a wide range of AWS services. It simplifies the process of creating backups and managing backup policies for resources like Amazon EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, and more.

Key Benefits of AWS Backup

• Manage backups for multiple AWS services from a single dashboard.
• Create backup plans with automated scheduling and retention policies.
• Data is encrypted both in transit and at rest to meet compliance and security standards.
• Enables backup replication across regions and accounts to support high availability and disaster recovery.

While AWS Backup offers strong native integration for AWS services, its capabilities are mostly limited to the AWS ecosystem. That’s where Vinchin steps in with a broader, cross-platform approach.

For more advanced backup automation, especially at scale, you can explore how to manage AWS Backup settings using CloudFormation templates.

An Introduction to Vinchin Backup & Recovery for EC2

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is an enterprise-grade data protection platform that supports virtual, physical, and cloud environments. It integrates with popular hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, oVirt, and cloud platforms such as AWS.

When used with Amazon EC2, Vinchin enables users to:

• Perform full, incremental, or differential backups.
• Restore entire EC2 instances, individual volumes, or specific files.
• Migrate instances from AWS to other platforms like VMware, Hyper-V, and Proxmox using cloud-to-virtual (C2V) recovery.
• Archive backups securely using Amazon S3 integration.

If you’re exploring other tools for EC2 backup, check out our comparison guide on backing up Amazon EC2 VMs using Acronis.

How to Back Up EC2 Instances with Vinchin

1. First, log in to the Vinchin web console and choose the EC2 instance we want to back up.
2. Then, choose a backup storage location. This can be local storage, cloud storage, or Amazon S3.
3. Next, set up the backup plan by choosing between full, incremental, or differential backups. We can also schedule the backup frequency and retention period.
4. Now, review the settings and submit the job. Once initiated, the backup process will run according to the configuration.

For automated data transfers and large-scale backup strategies, AWS DataSync is another tool worth considering alongside Vinchin.

How to Restore EC2 Instances with Vinchin

1. Go to Cloud Backup > Restore in the Vinchin console. Choose the appropriate restore point for the EC2 instance.
2. Then, select where we want to restore the instance. This can be back to AWS or to another virtualization platform like VMware or Proxmox. Choose between:
   • Instance Recovery: Restores the entire instance.
   • Volume Recovery: Restores only selected volumes.
3. Now, choose whether the restore should be:
   • Scheduled: Restore at a specific time.
   • One-Time: Immediate restore.

   We can also define the transmission method and other advanced options.
4. Then, submit the restore job. The system will redirect us to the job list, where we can monitor progress in real time. The dashboard displays the transmission speed and job status.

Once complete, the EC2 instance will be fully restored and operational.

Granular Restore: Recover Individual Files

If we don’t need to recover the entire instance, Vinchin supports granular recovery, allowing us to restore specific files from the EC2 backup. It is ideal for quick fixes or recovering lost data without affecting the full environment.

This capability is similar to restoring individual data indices in managed services like Amazon OpenSearch. Learn more about AWS Elasticsearch (OpenSearch) backup and restore here.

[Need assistance with a different issue? Our team is available 24/7.]

Conclusion

While AWS Backup offers an excellent native option for protecting your EC2 instances, Vinchin Backup & Recovery brings added flexibility, cross-platform compatibility, and advanced recovery features to the table.

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to back up and restore an EC2 instance with Vinchin Backup & Recovery.