How to Enable Automatic File Backups in your Cloudinary Account

This tutorial provides steps to properly enable automatic file backups on your Cloudinary account. For further details about Cloudinary's backup capabilities, we recommend reviewing our documentation sections on backups and revisions.

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Tutorial Sections

• Understanding the Purpose of Automatic Backups
• Enabling Automatic Backups via the Cloudinary Management Console
• Testing Your Enabled Backup Processes
• Additional Resources

Understanding the Purpose of Automatic Backups 

One very useful feature of Cloudinary’s service is its ability to backup your files, such as images and videos. This includes revisions of your existing assets, as well as deleted files that you can restore.

Only original files receive the backup treatment because derived and transformed files can always be recreated from the original file. Also, Cloudinary does not back up fetched assets.

Cloudinary handles the backup process by copying each original file to a secondary write-protected location. If you have enabled Automatic Backup without setting a designated Amazon or Google bucket, the storage will count against your Cloudinary storage threshold. 

Our Customer Success team is always available for consultation and assistance, if you have any questions or concerns before implementing our backup feature. This feature is also available for all service plans.

If you plan to back up your assets to your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets instead of Cloudinary’s storage, any of our paid service plans offer that as an option. 

In either case, all newly uploaded assets will be automatically backed up after you turn Automatic Backup on for your account.

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Enabling Automatic Backups via the Cloudinary Management Console

Note: If you are planning on using your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets instead of Cloudinary’s storage, we recommend setting up those buckets with your Cloudinary account before proceeding with the following steps. You can refer to the documentation hereto set up your own backup storage.

To set up Cloudinary’s Automatic Backup feature, take the following steps:

1. Log into your Cloudinary Management Console.
   
   
2. Select the Settings icon, which resembles a gear on the bottom left side.
   
   
3. Select the Upload Settings & Backup tab on the left.
   
   
4. At this point, you should able to start setting up the account backups. This can be done by clicking the Automatic Backup drop-down field and choosing Enabled. Then, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click the Save button.
   
   
   
5. Directly under the Automatic Backup drop-down field is a new link labeled Perform initial backup. Select it (you can see it in the screenshot above).
   
   If you have successfully done this, a popup window labeled Initial Backup will appear. Additionally, the email address associated with your account will be added to the window’s Notification email field. Verify or change the address, then select the window’s OK button.

Once you do this, the Perform initial backup link will change to a Successfully initiated backup confirmation message.

6. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and select the Save button.
   
   

If you have followed these steps, you should receive an automated email from support@cloudinary.com. It will be sent to the address specified in Step #5 of this process.The email will state that the backup has been completed successfully and include details on the total amount of assets that were stored in a specific account.

Using the example screenshot above, 316 assets were backed up for the account/cloud named “tamarayul”.

The amount of time for this process to occur will depend on the amount of assets stored in your Cloudinary account, as well as the actual file sizes of those assets. However, you can always send us a support ticket if you do not receive the confirmation email within an hour of taking the proper steps. 

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Testing Your Enabled Backup Processes

Once you have properly set up your Automatic Backup feature, your selected asset in the Cloudinary Console can restore older versions of the asset, by double-clicking the asset or right-click ->Open

Clicking on the three dots at the top -> Version History

Now you can choose which version you want to restore from the popup window:

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Additional Resources

Further details about Cloudinary’s backup and revision options, including ways to specify the backup boolean parameter in our Upload API, can be found in our official documentation.

If you have any questions or comments from this tutorial, you can always send those to us as a support request.

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