Snapshot Scheduler

When was the last time someone manually took a snapshot of your production volumes? Yesterday? Last week? You're not sure? That's the problem.

Manual backups don't happen. Not reliably. Someone forgets, someone is on vacation, someone assumed someone else was doing it. And then a disk fails, a bad deploy overwrites data, and you're restoring from a snapshot that's three weeks old. Three weeks of data, gone.

Or the opposite problem: someone set up a cron job for snapshots two years ago and never configured retention. Now you have 700 snapshots eating storage budget, and nobody knows which ones are safe to delete.

What it does

Snapshot Scheduler creates snapshots of your Outscale volumes on a schedule you define — and cleans up old ones automatically based on your retention policy.

Daily snapshots of production volumes, keeping the last 14. Weekly snapshots of databases, keeping the last 8. Whatever your policy requires, you define it once and it runs forever. No human in the loop. No forgetting.

The scheduler creates the snapshot, tags it, and — once your retention limit is reached — removes the oldest one. Your snapshot count stays constant. Your storage costs stay predictable. Your backups stay current.

How it works

Select volumes. Set a schedule — how often to snapshot. Set retention — how many to keep. That's it.

The scheduler runs at the defined interval, creates the snapshot, and checks the retention count. If you're over the limit, it removes the oldest snapshot. Every action is logged: creation, deletion, any errors.

You can see all managed snapshots in one view: which volumes are covered, how many snapshots exist for each, when the last one was taken, when the next one is due. No more "did the backup run?" — you see it at a glance.

Need to restore? Every snapshot is a standard Outscale snapshot — you can use it with Mount Snapshot or Instance Restore, or directly through the Outscale console or API. The scheduler creates them; you use them however you need.

Why it matters

Backups are insurance. The whole point is that they're there when you need them — and you almost never need them. That makes them easy to neglect. Easy to skip. Easy to forget.

Automated scheduling removes the human failure mode. The backup happens because the system does it, not because someone remembered. When a disaster hits — and it will, eventually — you're restoring from yesterday, not from three weeks ago.

On the cost side, retention policies prevent snapshot sprawl. Without them, snapshot storage grows linearly forever. A retention limit of 14 means you have 14 snapshots. Period. Predictable, bounded, no surprises on the bill.

The combination — reliable creation plus automatic cleanup — means your backups are both trustworthy and affordable. That's the baseline your infrastructure should have.

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