Enterprise data protection cannot rely on manual intervention. At scale, relying on administrators to schedule individual backups or manage storage growth is a severe operational risk.
StateWarden solves this through Declarative Backup Policies.
Instead of configuring isolated jobs, you define the desired state of resilience for a Device or an entire Realm. The StateWarden Control Plane (Artemis) autonomously orchestrates the scheduling, execution, and lifecycle management of all backups, while strictly enforcing our Fair Use quotas to guarantee predictable costs and system stability.
1. The Anatomy of a Backup Policy
A Backup Policy in StateWarden is a contract that dictates when data is secured and how long it is retained.
Core Components
- Target Selection: Which physical or logical volumes are included (e.g.,
C:\,/dev/md0p1). - Schedule (RPO): The frequency of backups, defining your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) (e.g., Daily at 02:00 AM, Every 4 Hours).
- Retention (Lifecycle): The duration backups are kept before being cryptographically purged (e.g., Keep 7 Days, Keep 30 Days).
Assigning Policies
Policies can be assigned dynamically:
- Global Realm Default: Automatically applied to every new Device that joins the Realm.
- Device-Specific Overrides: High-value servers (e.g., Database Nodes) can be assigned custom, more aggressive policies.
2. Configuring a Backup Policy
- Navigate to the Backup Policies section within your Realm Dashboard.
- Click Create New Policy.
- Name your Policy: Use descriptive names (e.g.,
Mission Critical - 4H RPO,Standard Desktop - Daily). - Define the Schedule: Select the interval or specific times of day.
- Set the Retention Limit: Define how many days backups should be retained.
- Assign Devices: Select the specific Agents this policy should govern, or set it as the Realm Default.
3. The Artemis Orchestrator
Once a policy is active, the StateWarden Control Plane takes over. Artemis acts as an intelligent orchestrator:
- Jitter and Load Balancing: Artemis does not blindly trigger 1,000 agents simultaneously at midnight. It introduces micro-jitter and monitors the Driad Storage Nodes, distributing the load to prevent network or disk IO bottlenecks on the Data Plane.
- Heartbeat Synchronization: If a Device is offline (e.g., a powered-down laptop) when a backup is scheduled, Artemis will queue the task and dispatch it immediately upon the Agent's next heartbeat connection.
4. Smart Quota Management (Fair Use)
To ensure consistent performance and prevent abuse within multi-tenant or enterprise environments, StateWarden enforces Smart Quotas via a robust, Redis-backed tracking system.
Understanding Daily Limits
Limits are defined per device, based on your Realm's Subscription Tier:
- Max Backups per Day: Prevents misconfigured policies (e.g., 5-minute intervals) from flooding the Storage Nodes.
- Max Security Scans per Day: Limits the frequency of intensive Vigil threat intelligence scans.
Quota Enforcement
When Artemis prepares to dispatch a START_BACKUP task, it first consults the Quota Engine.
- If the device has exceeded its daily limit (e.g., 20/20 backups), Artemis will Reject the task and log a
QUOTA_EXCEEDEDevent in the Realm Audit Log. - The Dashboard will visually indicate if a device is currently throttled.
- Quotas reset automatically at UTC Midnight.
Note: Manual backups triggered directly from the Dashboard also count towards the daily quota.
StateWarden: Resilience Engineered.