# Step 2 - Object Storage Continuous Backup

Maintaining one year of data within your Prometheus is doable, but not easy. It's tricky to
resize, backup or maintain this data long term. On top of that Prometheus does not do any replication,
so any unavailability of Prometheus results in query unavailability.

This is where Thanos comes to play. With a single configuration change we can allow Thanos Sidecar to continuously upload blocks of metrics
that are periodically persisted to disk by the Prometheus.

> NOTE: Prometheus when scraping data, initially aggregates all samples in memory and WAL (on-disk write-head-log). Only after 2-3h it "compacts"
> the data into disk in form of 2h TSDB block. This is why we need to still query Prometheus for latest data, but overall with this change
> we can keep Prometheus retention to minimum. It's recommended to keep Prometheus retention in this case at least 6 hours long, to have safe buffer
> for a potential event of network partition.

## Starting Object Storage: Minio

Let's start simple S3-compatible Minio engine that keeps data in local disk:

```
mkdir /root/minio && \
docker run -d --rm --name minio \
     -v /root/minio:/data \
     -p 9000:9000 -e "MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=minio" -e "MINIO_SECRET_KEY=melovethanos" \
     minio/minio:RELEASE.2019-01-31T00-31-19Z \
     server /data
```{{execute}}

Create `thanos` bucket:

```
mkdir /root/minio/thanos
```{{execute}}

## Verification

To check if the Minio is working as intended, let's [open Minio server UI](https://[[HOST_SUBDOMAIN]]-9000-[[KATACODA_HOST]].environments.katacoda.com/minio/)

Enter the credentials as mentioned below:

**Access Key** = `minio`
**Secret Key** = `melovethanos`

## Sidear block backup

All Thanos components that use object storage uses the same `objstore.config` flag with the same "little" bucket config format.

Click `Copy To Editor` for config to propagate the configs to the file `bucket_storage.yaml`:

<pre class="file" data-filename="bucket_storage.yaml" data-target="replace">
type: S3
config:
  bucket: "thanos"
  endpoint: "127.0.0.1:9000"
  insecure: true
  signature_version2: true
  access_key: "minio"
  secret_key: "melovethanos"
</pre>

Let's restart sidecar with updated configuration in backup mode.

```
docker stop prometheus-0-eu1-sidecar
```{{execute}}

[Thanos sidecar](https://thanos.io/tip/components/sidecar.md/) allows to backup all the blocks that Prometheus persists to
the disk. In order to accomplish this we need to make sure that:

* Sidecar has direct access to the Prometheus data directory (in our case host's /root/prom-eu1 dir) (`--tsdb.path` flag)
* Bucket configuration is specified `--objstore.config-file`
* `--shipper.upload-compacted` has to be set if you want to upload already compacted blocks when sidecar starts. Use this only
when you want to upload blocks never seen before on new Prometheus introduced to Thanos system.

Let's run sidecar:

```
docker run -d --net=host --rm \
    -v /root/editor/bucket_storage.yaml:/etc/thanos/minio-bucket.yaml \
    -v /root/prom-eu1:/prometheus \
    --name prometheus-0-eu1-sidecar \
    -u root \
    quay.io/thanos/thanos:v0.23.0 \
    sidecar \
    --tsdb.path /prometheus \
    --objstore.config-file /etc/thanos/minio-bucket.yaml \
    --shipper.upload-compacted \
    --http-address 0.0.0.0:19090 \
    --grpc-address 0.0.0.0:19190 \
    --prometheus.url http://127.0.0.1:9090
```{{execute}}

## Verification

We can check whether the data is uploaded into `thanos` bucket by visitng [Minio](https://[[HOST_SUBDOMAIN]]-9000-[[KATACODA_HOST]].environments.katacoda.com/minio/).
It will take couple of seconds to synchronize all blocks.

Once all blocks appear in the minio `thanos` bucket, we are sure our data is backed up. Awesome! 💪
