BlueXP backup and recovery enables you to back up ONTAP volumes from the following source working environments to the following secondary working environments and object storage in public and private cloud providers. Snapshot copies reside on the source working environment.

You can restore ONTAP data from a backup file that resides in a secondary working environment (a replicated volume) or in object storage (a backup file) to the following working environments. Snapshot copies reside on the source working environment and can be restored only to that same system.

Note that references to "on-premises ONTAP systems" includes FAS, AFF, and ONTAP Select systems.

BYOL is term-based (1, 2, or 3 years) and capacity-based in 1 TiB increments. You pay NetApp to use the service for a period of time, say 1 year, and for a maximum amount capacity, say 10 TiB.

You'll receive a serial number that you enter in the BlueXP digital wallet page to enable the service. When either limit is reached, you'll need to renew the license. The Backup BYOL license applies to all source systems associated with your BlueXP account.

Learn how to manage your BYOL licenses.

BlueXP backup and recovery offers consumption-based licensing in a pay-as-you-go model. After subscribing through your cloud provider's marketplace, you pay per GiB for data that's backed up — there's no up-front payment. You are billed by your cloud provider through your monthly bill.

Learn how to set up a pay-as-you-go subscription.

Note that a 30-day free trial is available when you initially sign up with a PAYGO subscription.

When using AWS, two annual contracts are available for 1, 2, or 3 year terms:

When using Azure, two annual contracts are available for 1, 2, or 3 year terms:

When using GCP, you can request a private offer from NetApp, and then select the plan when you subscribe from the Google Cloud Marketplace during BlueXP backup and recovery activation.

Learn how to set up annual contracts.

Backups reside in different locations based on the type of backup:

If you want to change the destination object store for a cluster in the future, you'll need to unregister BlueXP backup and recovery for the working environment, and then enable BlueXP backup and recovery using the new cloud provider information.

When you enable BlueXP backup and recovery for a working environment, all the volumes you initially select are backed up using the policies that you select. You can select separate policies for Snapshot copies, replicated volumes, and backup files. If you want to assign different backup policies to certain volumes that have different recovery point objectives (RPO), you can create additional policies for that cluster and assign those policies to the other volumes after BlueXP backup and recovery is activated.

You can choose a combination of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups of all volumes. For backup to object you can also select one of the system-defined policies that provide backups and retention for 3 months, 1 year, and 7 years. Backup protection policies that you have created on the cluster using ONTAP System Manager or the ONTAP CLI will also appear as selections. This includes policies created using custom SnapMirror labels.

Once you have reached the maximum number of backups for a category, or interval, older backups are removed so you always have the most current backups (and so obsolete backups don't continue to take up space).

See Backup schedules for more details about how the available schedule options.

Note that you can create an on-demand backup of a volume from the Backup Dashboard at any time, in addition to those backup files created from the scheduled backups.

If your cluster is using ONTAP 9.11.1 or greater, you can protect your backups in object storage from deletion and ransomware attacks. Each backup policy provides a section for DataLock and Ransomware Protection that can be applied to your backup files for a specific period of time - the retention period.

Scheduled ransomware protection scans are enabled by default. The default setting for the scan frequency is for 7 days. The scan occurs only on the latest Snapshot copy. The scheduled scans can be disabled to reduce your costs. You can enable or disable scheduled ransomware scans on the latest Snapshot copy by using the option on the Advanced Settings page. If you enable it, scans are performed weekly by default. You can change that schedule to days or weeks or disable it, saving costs.

The backup retention period is the same as the backup schedule retention period; plus 14 days. For example, weekly backups with 5 copies retained will lock each backup file for 5 weeks. Monthly backups with 6 copies retained will lock each backup file for 6 months.

Support is currently available when your backup destination is Amazon S3, Azure Blob, or NetApp StorageGRID. Other storage provider destinations will be added in future releases.

For more details, refer to this information:

When using certain cloud storage you can move older backup files to a less expensive storage class/access tier after a certain number of days. You can also choose to send your backup files to archival storage immediately without being written to standard cloud storage. Note that archival storage can't be used if you have enabled DataLock.

See Archival storage settings for more details about archiving older backup files.