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Setting up an account

With Afi Backup for AWS, you can configure periodic backups of your EC2 instances in a few easy steps.

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Afi plans to extend AWS infrastructure support in the next product updates, including RDS databases, EFS file storage, AWS cloud configuration, and other workloads.

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You can also add and protect your AWS Kubernetes clusters (both EKS and self-managed) with Afi as described in the Afi Kubernetes installation guide.

Create an Afi account

Please follow the Afi onboarding guide to set up your Afi account. After an account is created and your AWS tenant is added, you can proceed with protecting EC2 instances and running your first backups.

Protect resources

To start protecting your data, go to the Service → Protection screen and choose resources which you want to back up and their protection policies (SLAs). A protection policy defines how often backups are scheduled and how long backup data is retained.

Afi Backup for AWS provides several predefined backup policies that you can use right away or modify/create new policies:

After that, you can assign protection policies to all resources in the AWS tenant or select specific resource groups to be protected.

Assign SLA to a specific resource

Assign SLA to a resource group

Afi allows you to easily protect and back up all EC2 instances or a selected set of EC2 instances matching certain criteria, as well as ensure that new EC2 instances are automatically protected.

Protecting all EC2 instances

To protect all EC2 instances in the AWS tenant, you can assign a backup SLA policy to the default EC2 Instances resource group on the Service → Protection → Resource groups tab.

Protecting EC2 instances matching certain criteria

To protect all EC2 instances in the AWS tenant based on certain criteria (region, tag, etc.), you can create a dynamic resource group that will be populated based on the selected criteria on the Service → Protection → Dynamic groups tab and assign a backup SLA policy to the group.

Assigning multiple SLA policies to a resource

For AWS tenants, you can create multiple independent backup sequences for a resource (EC2 instance) by protecting it multiple times using different backup SLA policies (e.g., Gold and Silver). This approach enables you to back up resource data to multiple backup storage locations in different regions (coming in H2 2025).

Please note that each backup sequence is linked to its corresponding backup SLA policy. If you assign a new backup SLA to a resource and initiate a backup, it will create a new backup sequence from scratch.

Backup

When using protection SLA policies with a periodic backup schedule (for example, the default Bronze, Silver, and Gold policies), backups are performed automatically according to the schedule defined in the corresponding SLA policies.

Afi displays the time of the next scheduled backup on the Service → Protection tab for each resource protection. With the Manual backup schedule (for example, the default Manual policy), backups are not performed automatically and should instead be triggered manually.

Run backup

You can trigger a backup for a resource manually on the Protection screen or click the Backup all now button on the Overview screen to initiate backups for all protected resources in the tenant.

Monitor backup progress

You can monitor the backup status on the Service → Protection screen (see the progress wheel in the Status column) or on the Activity → Tasks screen:

To simplify progress monitoring, you can filter tasks with the In Progress status on the Activity → Tasks tab:

After a backup is completed, you can access the backup data by clicking the Recover button for the corresponding resource and policy on the Service → Protection screen.

Data browsing and preview

EC2 instances

Inside the instance backup, you can browse its configuration, data volumes, and volume content.

Afi indexes EC2 instance configuration, allowing you to easily locate backed up resources matching certain criteria (tag, IP address, etc.) via global search.

The example below shows a search query to match all backed up instances that reside in the eu-west-1 region:

Export

Afi allows you to export configuration and data for backed up AWS instances locally:

Data restore

Afi supports the following disaster recovery scenarios for AWS infrastructure: