Google Backup and DR adds cross-region backups for compute, disks, and Filestore

Google announced general availability of cross-region backups in Backup and DR Service on June 25. The launch post lists Compute Engine instances, disks, and Filestore as supported resources, with Cloud SQL and AlloyDB described as future additions at that time.

Backup placement becomes an explicit choice

The feature lets a backup vault reside in a different region from the protected resource. Google describes configuring a backup plan in the source region and selecting a vault in the recovery region.

For infrastructure teams, this creates a more deliberate placement decision than keeping every backup beside its source. It can support a plan for losing access to a region, but the existence of a remote copy does not establish recovery time or application readiness.

A usable recovery environment also needs compute capacity, configuration, permissions, dependencies, and a way to direct users to the restored service. Those requirements should be reviewed alongside the backup destination.

Rehearse restoration, not only copying

Choose one representative workload and restore it into the intended recovery region. Verify the application’s data, startup sequence, and connectivity rather than stopping when the storage operation succeeds.

Measure how long each step takes and which actions require a person with special access. A regional incident is a poor time to discover that the recovery team cannot read the vault or obtain a required secret.

Teams should also decide how the application returns to its primary region and how writes made during recovery will be handled. Backup placement is one part of that larger sequence.

The immediate action is to classify workloads by acceptable data loss and outage duration, then use a restore exercise to validate the selected regional backup design before relying on it operationally.