The Ceph backup driver supports backing up volumes of any type to a Ceph backend store. It is also capable of detecting whether the volume to be backed up is a Ceph RBD volume and if so, attempts to perform incremental/differential backups. Support is also included for the following in the case of source volume being a Ceph RBD volume: backing up within the same Ceph pool (not recommended) backing up between different Ceph pools backing up between different Ceph clusters At the time of writing, differential backup support in Ceph/librbd was quite new so this driver accounts for this by first attempting differential backup and falling back to full backup/copy if the former fails. If incremental backups are used, multiple backups of the same volume are stored as snapshots so that minimal space is consumed in the backup store and restoring the volume takes a far reduced amount of time compared to a full copy. Note that Cinder supports restoring to a new volume or the original volume the backup was taken from. For the latter case, a full copy is enforced since this was deemed the safest action to take. It is therefore recommended to always restore to a new volume (default). To enable the Ceph backup driver, include the following option in cinder.conf: backup_driver=cinder.backup.driver.ceph The following configuration options are available for the Ceph backup driver. Here is an example of the default options for the Ceph backup driver. backup_ceph_conf=/etc/ceph/ceph.conf backup_ceph_user=cinder backup_ceph_chunk_size=134217728 backup_ceph_pool=backups backup_ceph_stripe_unit=0 backup_ceph_stripe_count=0