It’s a familiar story in IT operations. You run your backups, the jobs complete successfully, and everything looks great. Backup windows close with green checkmarks rolling in and the team moves on. 

The backup is forgotten—until that is you actually need to restore something.

This is when the reality of modern cloud storage sets in. Object storage (Amazon S3 or Azure Blob) has grown dramatically in both size and importance. They hold critical application data, telemetry, media assets, compliance archives and much more. 

Some of these storage locations hold hundreds of millions of objects and terabytes of data. Recovering one of them is not a quick operation. But Rubrik Prioritized Recovery for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob can significantly reduce the time it takes to bring your critical data storage (and your business) back online.

Why Restoring Object Storage Takes So Long

To fully understand this scenario it helps to understand why backup often feels so fast while restore feels painfully slow. When backing up object storage, data protection vendors often leverage optimized, parallel reads to efficiently capture the data. This operation is designed to run in the background without disrupting workloads.

Restore, however, is a different animal. Recovering objects back into a bucket requires individual API calls for each object. Cloud provider APIs impose rate limits on these PUT operations. With millions of objects in the mix, even a highly parallelized restore process can take much longer than its backup counterpart. Every object is a transaction. Every transaction takes time. The math is very unforgiving when dealing with buckets at scale.

This is not a flaw in the backup product. It’s a fundamental constraint of how object storage APIs work.

Native Services are All or Nothing

While native cloud services such as AWS Backup and Azure Backup are great for providing basic protection for object storage, their recovery model is very limited; you either restore the entire bucket or blob container, restore a few individual files or objects, or restore nothing at all. There is no concept of prioritization when performing a full bucket restore.

For large buckets or blob containers, a full restore can stretch across hours or days. All the while, applications and services that depend on that storage are waiting. Your teams are waiting. Your customers are waiting. The business impact accumulates with every passing minute, regardless of whether the data those downstream consumers actually need has been restored yet.

The problem is that most data protection vendors treat buckets and blob containers as a monolithic unit. But in practice, not all objects are created equally; some are actively needed to resume business operations while others are simply archival, historical, or low-priority data. Native backup has no way to express that distinction and customers have no way to act on it. 

That is, until now.

Introducing Rubrik Prioritized Recovery for S3 and Blob

Rubrik’s Prioritized Recovery for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob puts the restore control back in the hands of your administrators. Rather than treating a bucket or a blob container recovery as a single, undifferentiated operation, Rubrik Prioritized Recovery allows you to define which objects matter most,and ensures that those are restored first.

Using glob patterns, you can specify the files or folder paths that are critical to your operations. Rubrik will prioritize the recovery of these objects at the front of the restore queue, getting your most important data back online while the rest of the bucket continues to restore in the background.

For an S3 example, you might prioritize:

• Active application configuration files stored in a known prefix (e.g. config/*)
   

• Specific object types matching file extensions that a downstream application requires
   

• Any named pattern that maps to your operational recovery priorities
   

Unsure what’s going to match? No problem. Rubrik also gives you the ability to quickly preview what is prioritized.

The remainder of the bucket—those archival records, historical snapshots, and lower-priority objects—will all continue to restore automatically after the prioritized objects are complete. The full recovery still happens, it just happens in the right order. If desired, you can easily choose to restore just the prioritized data as well.

The Real-World RTO Impact

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is not simply the time it takes for a restore to fully complete—it’s the time until your business can resume functioning. When dealing with large-scale object storage those are very different numbers.

With an all or nothing restore model, your effective RTO is determined by the slowest, last object in the bucket or blob container. With Prioritized Recovery your effective RTO is determined by the time it takes to just restore objects your applications and services need to come back online, which can be a fraction of the total restore time.

This gap matters enormously in real outage scenarios. If the critical objects that your production application needs represent only 5% of the bucket, Prioritized Recovery can potentially have you back online in the fraction of the time a total restore would require. That remaining 95% continues in the background, but no longer blocks your normal business operations.

Recovery that matches your priorities, not the alphabet

Object storage has become foundational infrastructure for modern applications. As bucket and blob container sizes grow, the gap between a completed backup and meaningful restore has widened significantly. Prioritized Recovery for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob closes that gap by making sure the parts that matter most arrive first.

Because when the wall starts crumbling, what you need is not a complete rebuild. You need those load bearing walls back up. Fast!

Take Rubrik’s Prioritized Recovery for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob for a spin today by taking one of our self-guided, hands-on labs on Rubrik Explore.