Data Backup and Restoration Strategy

Importance of Backup

• Often underappreciated but crucial in preventing data loss
• Necessary for various scenarios like ransomware attacks, accidental deletion, or hardware failure
• Essential for business continuity and disaster recovery

Key Considerations

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

• How much data loss is the organization willing to suffer?
• Determines backup frequency, strategy, and costs
• Examples: 3 days, 12 hours, 1 hour

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

• How fast should data and systems be recovered after an incident?

Backup Duration and Agreement

• Number of days worth of backup needed
• May depend on customer agreements

Hot vs Cold Backups

• Hot Backups: Ready for immediate restoration, essential for business operations
• Cold Backups: Slower storage for long-term archival, used for auditing or legal reasons

Designing a Backup Strategy

Understanding Business Objectives

• Clarity on RPO, RTO, and other business objectives from stakeholders

Types of Backups

• Full Backup: Complete backup each time
• Incremental Backup: Full backup initially, followed by backups of changes only

Storage Solutions

• Sufficient hardware and redundancy required
• Options: On-premises storage, cloud storage
• Costs for storage, data transfer, hardware, licensing, and personnel

Special Scenarios

• Backing up databases with real-time changes
• Software that stores data in memory rather than on disk

Data Security

• Ensuring data security through encryption
• Encryption for data at rest, especially when transferred to secondary locations

Backup Reliability

• Testing integrity of backups in a sandbox environment

Identifying the Audience's Needs

• Importance of data for various users
• Different data storage locations for applications (e.g., CRM, databases, Docker containers)

Backup Solutions for Different Platforms

• Individual users: Time Machine (Mac OS), Windows Backup, Linux tools (Data Duper, Chronopete)
• Organizations: Central and robust backup mechanisms, full and incremental backups, manual or automatic

Enterprise Solutions

• Off-the-shelf solutions: Expensive but scalable, includes support for special scenarios
• Free and open-source tools: Require custom strategy and addressing points of failure

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

• Backup every save, creating multiple versions
• Saves block-level or byte-level differences
• Near real-time with minimal data loss
• Practical implementation shifts between continuous and near-continuous

Cloud and Virtual Environments

• Options for creating snapshots (AWS, VMware, Zen, KVM)

Practical Use Cases

• Daily incremental backups suitable for most small and medium enterprises
• Tools like RSYNC for differential backups without high costs

Future Discussions

• Exploring open-source/free tools for an effective data backup strategy
• Setting up an environment to test data restoration