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 addresses this through Declarative Backup Policies.
Instead of configuring isolated jobs, you define the desired state of protection for a Device. The StateWarden Control Plane (Artemis) orchestrates the scheduling, execution, and lifecycle management of all backups, while enforcing Fair Use quotas that keep resource consumption predictable.
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
- Device: Every policy is bound to one specific Device.
- Target Selection (Source): Which physical or logical volume is included (e.g.,
C:\,/dev/md0p1), selected from the block devices the Agent reports for that Device. - Schedule (RPO): The frequency of backups, defining your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - Daily, Weekly, Every 12/6/4/2 Hours (interval options depend on your subscription plan), or a custom cron expression.
- Retention (Lifecycle): How many days backups are kept before being purged (default: 30 days).
- State: Policies can be disabled without being deleted.
A Device can be governed by multiple policies - for example, a daily policy for the system volume and a 4-hour policy for a database volume.
2. Configuring a Backup Policy
- Navigate to Backup Policies (
/policies) in your Realm Dashboard. The page lists all policies grouped by Device, together with the Realm's storage utilization. - Click New Policy.
- Select the Device the policy should govern.
- Name your Policy: Use descriptive names (e.g.,
Mission Critical - 4H RPO,Standard Desktop - Daily). - Select the Source: Choose the target volume or block device.
- Define the Schedule: Select the interval or specific time of day.
- Set the Retention Limit: Define how many days backups should be retained.
- Save the policy. It appears in the per-device policy table, where it can later be edited, disabled, or deleted.
3. Scheduling and Dispatch
Once a policy is active, the StateWarden Control Plane takes over. Artemis evaluates the policy schedules and instructs the Agents to run the backups at the scheduled times.
Policies are distributed to Agents automatically: if a Device is offline (e.g., a powered-down laptop) when a backup is due, the backup is started when the Agent reconnects.
4. Daily Quotas (Fair Use)
To keep performance consistent and prevent misconfigured policies (e.g., a 5-minute interval) from overloading the infrastructure, StateWarden enforces daily, per-device quotas:
- Max Backups per Day - covers both scheduled and manually triggered backups.
- Max Security Scans per Day - covers Vigil inventory/malware scans.
Limits depend on your Realm's subscription plan and reset at UTC midnight. When a Device reaches its limit, the Control Plane rejects further backups or scans for that day and records the rejection in the Realm's audit trail (visible on the Events & Logs page).
For the full mechanics - real-time enforcement, subscription tiers, and throttled-device handling - see the canonical reference: Understanding Quotas and Fair Use in the Administration & Billing section.
StateWarden: Resilience Engineered.