Automated Backups

This feature requires HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) or self-managed Consul Enterprise. Refer to the enterprise feature matrix for additional information.

Consul Enterprise enables you to run the snapshot agent within your environment as a service (Systemd as an example) or scheduled through other means. Once running, the snapshot agent service operates as a highly available process that integrates with the snapshot API to automatically manage taking snapshots, backup rotation, and sending backup files offsite to Amazon S3 (or another S3-compatible endpoint), Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage.

This capability provides an enterprise solution for backup and restoring the state of Consul servers within an environment in an automated manner. These snapshots are atomic and point-in-time. Consul datacenter backups include (but are not limited to):

Key/Value Store Entries
Service Catalog Registrations
Prepared Queries
Sessions
Access Control Lists (ACLs)
Namespaces

For more experience leveraging Consul's snapshot functionality, we suggest you look through our HashiCorp Learn tutorial for Datacenter Backups in Consul. For detailed configuration information on configuring the Consul Enterprise's snapshot agent, review the Consul Snapshot Agent documentation.