Don't panic! How to quickly backup all of your machines

In the Dimension Data Cloud, you can enable file and application backups for your Virtual Machines for Linux and Windows.

For this example I will show you how to use some of the commands to get a list of servers that have backup, find the machines that have a File System agent (Windows or Linux), check if they have a running job and start a new job if not.

The scenario for this example is you want to run an update on your servers, like a kernel patch or a Windows update. Before you do so, you want to run a backup of all your machines.

Load the module and connect to the API

Import-Module CaaS

$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString "mySecure123Pa$$!" -AsPlainText -Force
$login= New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ("my-login-user", $secpasswd)

New-CaasConnection -ApiCredentials $login -ApiBaseUri "https://api-au.dimensiondata.com/oec/0.9/"

Now, you want to get a list of all the servers that have backup. Get the servers in your account and filter to those that have something in the backup field.

$serversWithBackup = Get-CaasDeployedServer | Where backup -NotLike $Null
foreach ( $server in $serversWithBackup) { 

For each of those servers, get a list of backup clients where the agent type (e.g. File System, SQL Server, MySQL) is the File System Agent. This is either FA.LINUX or FA.WIN.

    Write-Host $server.name is $server.backup.servicePlan 
    $fileClients = Get-CaasBackupClients -Server $server | Where type -Like "FA.%"

For each client, because you can have more than 1 file system client on a server, check if there is a running job by looking at the runningJob property of the client. If there is a job running, issue a warning (you can use this as an opportunity to cancel the job using " Remove-CaaSBackupJobAgent -Server $server -BackupClient $fileClient " but for my example I won't. Finally, issue a new request to start a backup using the New-CaasBackupJob command.

    foreach( $fileClient in $fileClients){
        
        if ($fileClient.runningJob.status -eq "Running") {
            Write-Warning "Another Job is already running for  $($server.name)" 
        } else { 
            Write-Host Starting backup of $server.name 
            New-CaasBackupJob -Server $server -BackupClient $fileClient 
        }
    }
}

So in summary, the script looks like:

Import-Module CaaS

$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString "mySecure123Pa$$!" -AsPlainText -Force
$login= New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ("my-login-user", $secpasswd)

New-CaasConnection -ApiCredentials $login -ApiBaseUri "https://api-au.dimensiondata.com/oec/0.9/"

$serversWithBackup = Get-CaasDeployedServer | Where backup -NotLike $Null
foreach ( $server in $serversWithBackup) { 

    Write-Host $server.name is $server.backup.servicePlan 
    $fileClients = Get-CaasBackupClients -Server $server | Where type -Like "FA.%"

    foreach( $fileClient in $fileClients){
        
        if ($fileClient.runningJob.status -eq "Running") {
            Write-Warning "Another Job is already running for  $($server.name)" 
        } else { 
            Write-Host Starting backup of $server.name 
            New-CaasBackupJob -Server $server -BackupClient $fileClient 
        }
    }
}