# Overview

Plakar Control Plane is a self-hosted backup management system built on top of
the open-source [Plakar](https://github.com/PlakarKorp/plakar). It brings
everything Plakar is good at like deduplication, encryption, independent
snapshots, flexible connectors and adds the tooling companies need to manage
backups at scale: a full web interface, centralized scheduling, inventory and
resource management, and more.

It is packaged as a virtual appliance you deploy in your own infrastructure, so
your data never leaves your environment.

## Who it's for?

Plakar Control Plane is designed for companies that need reliable, auditable
backups across multiple resources and environments, and for the sysadmins and
DevOps engineers responsible for keeping that running.

## How it works?

You deploy Plakar Control Plane as a virtual appliance on AWS, OVHcloud, or your
own infrastructure. From there, you connect it to your providers through
inventories, configure what gets backed up and where, and set schedules.
Everything is managed from the web interface.

When you first deploy, you go through an enrollment step that registers your
instance with `plakar.io`. This retrieves your license and sets up billing
reporting. No backup data is ever transferred, only the consumption metrics
needed for billing.

## Core concepts

- **Inventories** connect Plakar Control Plane to a provider and expose the list
  of resources available to back up. Managed inventories sync automatically;
  self-managed ones let you enter resources manually.

- **Connectors** are the individual sources, stores, and destinations attached
  to a resource. A source is what gets backed up, a store is where backups are
  kept, and a destination is where data gets restored to.

- **Secret providers** let you store credentials securely in an external manager
  like AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault.

- **Scheduling** defines when backup, restore, sync, and check jobs run. The
  scheduler handles concurrency automatically.

## What's next

- [Installation](./installation)
- [Enrollment](./enrollment)