Backing up Data

Introduction

Flywheel takes great pride in providing a world-class scientific data management solution that minimizes risk of data loss or corruption. Depending on whether Flywheel is deployed in the cloud or on premise, data integrity responsibilities rest either with Flywheel (based on the underlying cloud provider) or with the customer (on premises).

For reasons of security, scalability, maintainability, and finally data integrity, it is our general recommendation to deploy Flywheel in the cloud.

Instruction Steps

In the Cloud

Flywheel can be deployed on any of the major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. Each provider has its own backup and storage solutions.

For example, when Flywheel is deployed on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Flywheel utilizes Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for all persistent file storage. All GCS storage classes have 99.999999999% durability, achieved through erasure coding that stores data pieces redundantly across multiple disks located in different power and network failure domains.

Flywheel configures automated, nightly GCS bucket-to-bucket replication of the primary storage bucket to a secondary coldline bucket.

This backup bucket is configured with object versioning, and will act as a perpetual archive of all data uploaded to or generated by Flywheel, even when objects are deleted from the primary bucket.

This means that even if you delete data in Flywheel, it is still available in the backup.

On Premise

When Flywheel is deployed on premise (on customer-managed physical or virtual hardware) providing a highly-available and highly-durable storage system is the customer's responsibility.

Flywheel does not assist with or advise on the choice, configuration, deployment, tuning, administration, or security of such systems.