Two questions come before any backup strategy
- How much data can your business afford to lose?
- How long can it afford to be down?
Answer those and the backup strategy follows. Skip them and you have backups that may or may not do what you need on the day you find out.
Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective
Your Recovery Point Objective is how much data you’re prepared to lose, measured in time. An RPO of 15 minutes means 15 minutes of data is an acceptable loss.
Your Recovery Time Objective is how long you have to get back to that point. An RPO of 15 minutes with an RTO of four hours means four hours to restore the environment to within 15 minutes of where it was.
Together those two numbers determine what backups you need, how often, and in what form. They also have to be tested against the size of your database, because a restore takes as long as it takes regardless of what the policy says.
We work these out with you, then build the strategy to match. Talk to us about your recovery requirements.
Database integrity checks
Backups protect you from losing data. Integrity checks tell you whether you have some data corruption.
Data sits on disk, and disk has a lifespan. A single corrupt data page can go unnoticed for months if the application doesn’t touch that data often. Regular integrity checks give you early warning while a backup from before the corruption still exists.
This applies in the cloud as much as on-premises. Behind any platform service it’s still storage, and storage still fails.
What we do
As part of a managed service we review the database maintenance you have configured, what your backups are actually achieving, and whether the two match your recovery requirements. That review usually begins during a [Full Stack Health Check].
Further reading: The corruption you won’t find until it’s too late – how integrity checks work and why the cloud doesn’t remove the need for them.