To chime in on this: I agree with you that backups are important to protect against operator error. As a concrete example: we made a thankfully minor error with BigQuery, so now we periodically backup all our BigQuery tables.
The datastore backup tool is not great, but we do it for the same reason, and it does seem to work for us. Although now that I think about it: We haven't carefully manually checked our backups in a while, so I should go do that. Worst case: We've discussed writing something ourselves multiple times, that would scan our Datastore and writes entities out in a more useful way, but we haven't prioritized it. On Friday, October 28, 2016 at 5:07:13 AM UTC-4, Joshua Fox wrote: > > > > On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 12:17 AM, George (Cloud Platform Support) < > [email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > >> Hello Joshua, >> >> The necessity to backup data in your App Engine environment is not overly >> intense. A data protection policy >> <https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance> is in place, covering >> backups and all kind of risks to data in the cloud. If you backup your >> data, you do what has already been done for you in a thorough and >> systematic manner. >> > > But this data protection mechanism does not protect against team-member > error (nor hacker vandalism). Every team writes code and runs admin tools > to purposely delete and overwrite data. Although everyone works hard to > avoid bugs and mistakes, we are all human. Backups are needed to deal with > that. > > My approach to this topic seems quite different from that of the creators > of GAE, and I am wondering if I am missing something fundamental. Are most > of the thousands of GAE customers, not to mention Google itself (as a GAE > "customer") really doing without protection against such scenarios? The > Google Data Liberation Front showed a clear understanding of the need for > easy data exportability, yet that is missing here. > > > >> There is still a legitimate need to control your data and download it, >> and tools are in place to backup and restore >> <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/datastore-backing-up-restoring> >> >> . If you would like to set up an object versioning policy for your app >> environment, cloud storage buckets allow that >> <https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/object-versioning>. >> > > That is only for Storage, not Datastore. (Of course it might not be > reasonable to expect that for Datastore, but the point is that versioning, > which woul help meet my requirement, is not a possibility, unless I am > really missing something.)t > >> Each tool individually offers ways to backup data. >> > Neither the Google Datastore Backup utility nor the Managed Backup utility > work; I have confirmed these bugs with Google support. Hopefully these bugs > will be fixed, and perhaps other users' datasets to not trigger the bugs, > but again this raises questions about how hard it is to backup data. > > Storage can be backed up easily with *cp*. > > But there is absolutely no backup tool for Blobstore. (Is there?) Again, > do most customers write their own, or do they just leave their data in a > GAE Blobstore and hope for the best? > > The backup process does not include values stored in Blobstore or Cloud >> Storage >> <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/datastore-backing-up-restoring> >> . >> >> > > I hope this helps. Cheers! >> >> > Thank you. It is helping me understand the philosophy behind the paucity > of backup tools, but I still don't get the difference in attitude towards > accidental deletion or overwrite. > > Joshua > >> On Tuesday, October 25, 2016 at 2:29:17 AM UTC-4, Joshua Fox wrote: >>> >>> What do you do for backing up AppEngine data? >>> >>> From what I can see, there is no simple way to say "back up everything >>> in this GAE project" with a button-click or API call, nor even a way to do >>> this for most specific data-storage mechanisms. >>> >>> E.g., Datastore has a backup tool which has serious bugs that make it >>> inoperable. Blobstore has no backup mechanism. >>> >>> Do major users of AppEngine not have off-Google backups? True, GAE deals >>> with disk failure, but you have to protect against hacker vandalism as well >>> as team-member error. (One response I have received is "Don't make >>> mistakes." I won't bet on that.) >>> >>> The Google Data Liberation Front >>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front> seems to >>> have missed GAE. >>> >>> So, do you make do without? Do you write your own tools to backup (and >>> regularly restore), where Google tools are lacking? >>> >>> Joshua >>> >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/a3733b1a-5ed4-4c39-b4cc-bdbd7ee2aa24%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
