About Backup and Recovery on Autonomous AI Database

Describes Autonomous AI Database backup options.

All backups taken and managed by Oracle in Autonomous AI Database are immutable. Immutable backups cannot be deleted or modified.

Backups are designed to be highly durable, as follows:

• In regions with multiple availability domains, backups are automatically replicated across availability domains.

• In regions with a single availability domain, backups are automatically replicated across fault domains.

Automatic Backups

Autonomous AI Database performs periodic backups including full, cumulative, and incremental backups, to ensure data reliability and recoverability. Each database instance is continuously backed up to achieve the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of less than 10 seconds. See Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective for more information.

The choices for automatic backups are different depending on your compute model:

• OCPU compute model

  Autonomous AI Database automatically backs up your database for you. The retention period for backups is 60 days. You can restore and recover your database to any point-in-time in this retention period.

• ECPU compute model

  By default Autonomous AI Database automatically backs up your database for you and the retention period for backups is 60 days. Optionally, you can choose the backup retention period in days, from 1 to 60. You can restore and recover your database to any point-in-time in the specified retention period.

Billing for automatic backups depends on the compute model that you select when you provision or clone an Autonomous AI Database instance:

• OCPU compute model: the storage for automatic backups is included in the cost of database storage.

• ECPU compute model: the storage for backups is billed separately and in addition to database storage.

See How Is Autonomous AI Database Billed? for more information.

Backup Retention Lock

To further protect your data, you can enable the Backup Retention Lock option to lock the automatic backup retention period. Once locked, Autonomous AI Database does not allow changes to the retention period for automatic backups. This prevents any unintentional or unauthorized removal of older backups by modification of the backup retention period.

If you enable cross region disaster recovery or backup replication and you set the Backup Retention Lock option, the current primary’s backup retention period remains locked before or after a switchover or failover.

• While provisioning or cloning an Autonomous AI Database Instance, you can select the backup retention lock option.

  See Provision an Autonomous AI Database Instance and Clone an Autonomous AI Database Instance for more information.

• For an existing instance, you can update the settings of automatic backup retention and set the backup retention lock option.

  See Edit Automatic Backup Retention Period on Autonomous AI Database for more information.

The backup retention lock option is applicable for automatic backups only and does not affect long-term backups.

Long-Term Backups

Using the long-term backup feature you can create a long-term backup as a one-time backup or as scheduled long-term backup. You select the retention period for long-term backups in the range of a minimum of 3 months up to a maximum of 10 years.

See About Long-Term Backups on Autonomous AI Database for more information.

Recovery

You can initiate recovery for your Autonomous AI Database using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console. Autonomous AI Database automatically restores and recovers your database to the point-in-time you specify or using the backup you select from a list of backups.

See Restore and Recover your Autonomous AI Database for more information.

Clone from a Backup

You can use either an automatic backup or a long-term backup to create a clone of your database.

See Clone an Autonomous AI Database from a Backup for more information.

Listing Backups

The list of backups available for recovery is shown on the Autonomous AI Database details page on the Backups tab. Click the Backups tab to show the list of backups.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console Autonomous AI Database details page, in the Backup area shows the Total backup storage field. This fields shows the total storage being billed, including for automatic backups and if there are long-term backups, this also includes the long term backup storage.

See View Backup Information and Backups on Autonomous AI Database for more information.

About Long-Term Backups on Autonomous AI Database

Using the long-term backup feature you can create a long-term backup as a one-time backup or as scheduled long-term backup. You select the retention period for long-term backups in the range of a minimum of 3 months up to a maximum of 10 years.

Autonomous AI Database takes scheduled long-term backups automatically according to the schedule you create: one-time, weekly, monthly, or yearly.

You can create a new database by cloning from a long-term backup. You cannot use a long-term backup to recover or restore the same database where the long-term backup was created.

Long-term backup billing:

• ECPU compute model: Long-term backup storage is billed in addition to your database storage. The total of your automatic backups and long-term backups will be billed additionally as backup storage.

  See ECPU Compute Model Billing Information for more information about how backup storage is billed.

• OCPU compute model: Using the OCPU compute model, long-term backups are billed in addition to your database storage and long term backup storage is billed at the same rate as database storage. Long-term backup storage is billed based on the storage usage, rounded to the nearest Terabyte. If your long-term backup storage usage is 0.5 TB, you are billed for 1 TB (at the same rate as database storage).

  For example, if you provision your Autonomous AI Database with 3 TB of storage and you create several long-term backups amounting to 1.2 TB, you are billed for a total of 5 TB of storage, as follows:

  • 3 TB (the provisioned storage)

    plus

  • 2 TB (1.2TB of long-term backups rounded up)

  See OCPU Compute Model Billing Information for more information about how backup storage is billed.

Each long term backup is a standalone backup that allows you to create a point-in-time clone, based on the long-term backup timestamp.

See Create Long-Term Backups on Autonomous AI Database for more information.