OCI – File storage snapshot management

OCI file storage snapshots are not managed automatically by OCI like block volumes backups are when using policy-managed backups.

Which means that you have to create and delete the snapshots by yourself.

On this blog post I will share a shell script to accomplish this task using oci cli.

Here is an example to create daily snapshots: fssnap.sh

# !/bin/bash
export CLI=/home/oracle/ocicli
export FSSOCID=<file storage ocid>
export TSTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d`
export ENV=prod

# create snap
$CLI/oci fs snapshot create --file-system-id=$FSSOCID --name=$ENV.$TSTAMP

You can get the file storage ocid at OCI console:

Create a user and group and assign the below policy to the group:

Allow group StorageAdmins to manage file-family in compartment PROD

Schedule this shell script to run on a regular internal that fits your needs.

But in my case I had to keep a limited amount of backups based on same information such as: environment (prod or dev) and customer retention policy (bronze, silver or gold).

So I wrote another simple shell to accomplish this: fscleanup.sh

!/bin/bash
export CI=/home/oracle/ocicli
export FSSOCID=<file storage ocid>
export TSTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d`
export KEEP=42

# dump backups to tempfile
$CI/oci fs snapshot list --file-system-id=$FSSOCID | grep '"id"' | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/,//g' > /tmp/fss.bkp

#count
CT=`cat /tmp/fss.bkp | wc -l`

#remove backups older then $KEEP
if [ "$CT" -gt $KEEP ]; then
    DIFF=$(expr $CT - $KEEP)
    for id in `tail -$DIFF /tmp/fss.bkp`
    do
       $CI/oci fs snapshot delete --force --snapshot-id $id
    done
else
    echo "less then KEEP: $KEEP"
fi

Please check OCI doc about managing snapshots for more info.

Let’s wait for the OCI native and automated way for doing this but until then this is the workaround.