## Problem to solve Object storage is used exclusively to store GitLab data files (such LFS, uploads, etc) in Cloud Native Hybrid (CNH) environments. Any good backup solution should have the facilities to backup this data. Live data is exposed to accidental and malicious corruption such as accidental deletion by legitimate uses and ransomware attacks respectively. Backing up the object storage data will help protect against such corruption. While object storage guarantees 99.999999999% availability, backups are a reliable method to guarantee a copy of your data is stored in a location that is separate to your production environment and cannot easily be compromised. ## Proposal Backup object storage data to a separate bucket. Ideally to a separate bucket created and operated using a different service account to that of the production infrastructure and a different region for added security and resilience. The backup tools should provide the flexibility for customers to choose whether they want to use a separate service account, the regions for the backup bucket and configure necessary permission on the backup bucket. These decisions will be based on the customer's risk vs cost profile. Object storage data can be extremely large in volume and therefore costly to backup. While we will backup the entire contents during each backup run initially, incremental backups will be important for speeding up and cost saving reasons and should be implemented in a follow up iteration. We must provide customers guidance on best practices and options and tradeoffs for setting up the backup buckets in our documentation. Examples, * Backup bucket in a different regions - incurs inter region egress charges. Protects against regional outage. * Separate service account - protects against product service account comprise impacting safety of backups. More complex to operate and administer. ### Intended users [Sidney (Systems Administrator)](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas/#sidney-systems-administrator) ### Feature Usage Metrics N/A ### Does this feature require an audit event? Audit event available on vendor platform.