Why this matters
Backups are the last line of defence against data loss. Every engineer should know roughly how often we back up, how long backups are kept, and how to find the backup dashboard in case of an incident.
Cadence
- Daily snapshots, taken at 03:00 AEST.
- Weekly rollups every Sunday — kept for 12 months.
- Monthly rollups — kept for 7 years for compliance.
Where backups live
AlloyDB-managed backups live in the same project as the cluster. We also export weekly logical dumps to a Cloud Storage bucket in a separate region for disaster-recovery scenarios.
Restore tests
We run an automated restore test every Friday into an isolated project, time
how long it takes, and post the result to #data-platform. If you don't see
the green check by Saturday morning, escalate.
Dashboard
The backup status dashboard lives at https://console.cloud.google.com/alloydb/backups.
You'll need the alloydb.viewer role.
FAQ
- How long until a recent write is in a backup? Up to 24 hours for daily snapshots.
- Can I restore a single table? Not directly — you'd restore to a temporary cluster and copy the table out.
- Do we encrypt backups? Yes — both at rest and in transit, using customer-managed keys.