How does your company cope with a data crash?
Do you know what to do if a data crash happens? Do you have a good restore strategy? How quickly can you recover data and get back to work? Read our tips for a good restore strategy.
Backing up is a matter of course for most people
Making regular backups to avoid losing data is a matter of course for most people. It is important that this is done regularly to avoid losing important information. In a business context, it is extremely important that backup copies are taken, because here there can be enormous amounts of data that absolutely must not be lost.
Taking backups is important, but testing data recovery is even more important. For this reason, it is extremely important to set up a backup and recovery strategy so that you know what to do in the event of a data crash - and lose as little valuable time as possible.
Your recovery strategy is more important than you think
We often receive inquiries from companies about corruption in the database or disk crashes where the only solution is to read a previous backup copy in the database. If you then lack a well-developed RESTORE strategy, the risk of losing a lot of data is high, and it can affect payroll, invoicing, stock balances and all other data in the database.
Another issue could be that you have a very large database that you are good at backing up, but you haven't tested the backlink, which again can take a very long time and require a lot of space. What happens if you need to quickly reload a 10 TB database, but are not prepared for what is required in terms of infrastructure, such as disk and network?
The backup and recovery strategy
A backup and recovery strategy should include a backup component and a recovery component. The backup section defines the type of backup and how often the backup should be performed. It also defines the type and speed of the hardware needed for the backup. It is also important that it contains information on how the backup copies are to be tested and where and how the backup copies are to be stored.
The recovery strategy should define who is responsible for performing the recovery and how this should be performed to meet the goals you have set for database availability as well as minimize data loss and how to test the recovery.
Designing a recovery strategy is not something that can be done in the blink of an eye. Careful planning, implementation and testing is required. Yes, testing is necessary and required because you have no backup strategy until you have the backups included in the recovery strategy and have tested the recovered database.
Three important things to remember:
1. Formulate your requirements for RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). These are the most important building blocks of a Restore strategy. Once you have decided how much data you can lose and how long you can be offline with the database, then you can first create a recovery solution that suits your business.
2. Create a backup/recovery solution that supports your recovery strategy and meets your RPO and RTO requirements.
3. Test your backup/restore regularly so you know it's working and resources and infrastructure are ready if it hits.
Your backups are useless if you haven't tried to restore!
