About Source Accounts

This article explains how source accounts work in Eon, including essential details about connecting, disconnecting, and deleting them.

A source account is a cloud entity that contains the resources you want to back up. As a coverall term, these are called “accounts” in Eon. When working with a specific provider, they may be called accounts, subscriptions, projects, tenants, or workspaces.

When you connect a source account, you’ll grant Eon the permissions it needs to discover and back up the account’s resources. The permissions are installed using a deployment template. To review the deployment template and the permissions it installs, see the AWS, Azure, and GCP permissions deployment files.

Resources discovered in your source accounts are shown in your inventory, where you can view their properties, backup status, and snapshots. You can add as many source accounts as you need.

Disconnected and deleted source accounts

Disconnecting and deleting are two separate actions, with different effects. This section covers both.

Disconnected source accounts

Although you can disconnect a source account from Eon whenever you want, it’s important to know what this means for your resources and snapshots. Here are the details of what happens when you disconnect a source account:

Discovery and backup: Immediately, Eon stops reading the source account. Going forward, Eon won’t discover changes or back up source account resources.
Snapshot retention: Eon retains snapshots until they expire. This means you can restore and explore your snapshots even after disconnecting the source account.
Inventory: Resources with snapshots are shown in the inventory until all snapshots expire. Resources without snapshots, including those that were never backed up and those whose snapshots have all expired, are hidden from the inventory.
Resource status: Immediately, resources from a disconnected source account are given the Disconnected status.

You can reconnect a disconnected source account at any time. When you reconnect, Eon resumes discovery and backing up of resources in the account according to your backup policies.

Deleted source accounts

When you delete a source account, Eon permanently removes it from your source account list. This action can’t be undone. To use the account in Eon again, you’ll need to connect it as a new source account.

The Delete option in the source accounts page becomes available only when both of these are true:

The account status is Disconnected or Insufficient permissions.
All Eon snapshots for the account have expired. Snapshots expire automatically based on the retention period in their backup policies.

Hovering over the unavailable option shows which condition is unmet.

Here’s what happens after you delete a source account:

Source account list: The account is no longer shown.
Inventory: Resources from the account are no longer shown. Because all Eon snapshots must expire before deletion is possible, no snapshot data is lost at the moment of deletion.
Backup jobs: Backup jobs that ran for the deleted account remain in your job history with the original name preserved.

Account display names

Eon displays a source account using its name from the cloud provider, unless you set a custom display name in Eon. The display name appears consistently across Eon, including in your inventory, job details, notifications, and audit logs.

Setting a custom display name for the account in Eon always takes precedence over any names set in the cloud provider.

If you don’t set a custom display name, Eon infers one from information retrieved from the cloud provider:

AWS: Specialized logic is used, outlined in AWS account names below.
Azure: Subscription name is used.
GCP: Project name is used.

AWS account names

AWS source accounts can have two separate provider values, shown as Account name and Account alias in the account’s details:

Account name: Comes from AWS Organizations. Eon gets this value only for accounts connected as part of an AWS organization, and keeps it in sync automatically whenever it syncs the organization’s member accounts. Standalone AWS accounts, connected without an organization, have no account name and show only their alias.
Account alias. The account’s IAM alias, if one is set.

When both values are set and differ, Eon combines them into one display name, for example Production (acme-prod). If only one value is set, Eon shows that value alone. If neither is set, Eon shows the account ID.

Additional information

Permissions deployment files:

Source accounts:

Manage Source Accounts