When databases crash the impact on your company can be devastating. Without the proper database backup strategy in place, your company could suffer massive amounts of downtime, contributing to lost profits, and unhappy customers. A good database backup strategy should have three objectives: comprehensive backup, quick backups, and speedy restores. As you create your strategy, keep these 10 elements in mind.
1. Onsite backups
Creating an onsite backup of your database can get you back to work quickly if your server crashes. Rather than storing your backup on a local drive, which may be unavailable, backup to a network share. This will give you the ability to immediately restore your backup to another server and will cut out downtime.
2. Storage of older backups
Before you plan your backup strategy, decide how far back your company would wish to recover data in the wake of a loss event. An archive of older backups is a fall back plan for potentially corrupted, recent backups. If a problem were to arise with a newer backup, having the archive allows you to restore to the next healthy backup before the corrupted one. Discuss internally whether this archive should go back 30, 60, 90 days or another retention length.
3. Offsite backup
While onsite backups can be handy, they shouldn’t be relied on solely. If you suffer a data loss due to an onsite catastrophe, like a flood or fire, chances are your onsite backup will perish along with your database. If you can only have one or the other to include in your backup strategy — choose an offsite backup at a secure data center.
4. Data center standards
Storing data offsite safely requires your data center of choice have adequate security controls. As the data center will house a potentially company-saving backup of your data, security is not an area you should compromise on. Your data center of choice should pass an annual SSAE 16 Type 2 audit — a badge indicating it is meeting or exceeding industry standards for organization controls at both facility and procedural levels. Some signs of a quality data center include:
- Access controls: alarms, armed guards, video surveillance, gated perimeter, security checkpoints and locked server cabinets
- Availability controls: uninterruptible power supplies, diesel backup power generators, redundant cooling, multiple redundant gigabit internet connection
5. Data transmission controls
Security concerns at the data center level should not be the only ones you consider as you backup your database. Many companies don’t consider the fact that data can be compromised before it reaches the data center. To prevent this, make sure the data you’re updating to the data center is encrypted during transit as well. AES encryption, 256-bit encryption Twofish, and Triple DES encryption are all reliable choices.
6. Backup schedule
Have set times that you are going to backup the database to fit the needs of your business and the backup software. You need to backup often, as old backups have a higher potential of losing data. A set schedule ensures that at any point if your system were to crash, you would have an updated backup to restore it with. Questions to consider when determining the frequency of your backups are:
- How often do changes to the system occur?
- When are people accessing the database?
- How much space will this backup require?
7. Automatic cloud backup
Rather than relying on manual backups, which can be vulnerable to human error among other things, you should include an automatic cloud backup into your database backup strategy. You can tackle nearly all of your database backup strategy considerations by backing up your database with a trusted cloud backup provider. By finding a provider that delivers automatic, continuous cloud backup, you’ll never need to schedule a backup of your data again — the process is completely automated for you.
You can even find a cloud backup provider who meets the rest of the requirements every database backup strategy should include. Look for cloud backup plans that include end-to-end encryption features (keeping your data safe during transmission to the cloud) and annually audited data centers. To give you an idea of the available automatic cloud backup providers that can backup your database, Nordic Backup supports universal database backup, end-to-end encryption, world-class secure data centers, exchange database and mail level backup, and more. They even offer step-by-step tutorials that walk you through how to restore your database in the event of a crash or loss event.
8. Quick and simple restore
A backup won’t do your business any good if you don’t know how to restore the data. No matter how you backup, you’ll need to understand how to restore your backup in the event of a disaster to minimize downtime. If you’re working with a cloud backup provider like Nordic Backup, you may be able to bring your backup online as a virtual server until your servers become operational again (typically within a 1 day service window), or you may even be able to preemptively virtualize your servers so there’s zero wait time to restore the data.
9. Backup testing
As the saying goes, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Ensure that your backups are working by testing them on a test server or test system. Determine if you can restore the backup and how long doing so actually takes — this will keep your prepared if the inevitable happens. Test your backup as if a situation were to arise, by giving yourself different scenarios that may happen. An example would be, if files were destroyed and it corrupted part of your database, could you still perform a full recovery with your backup? Have a list of potential threats and test them. After testing your backup, you can analyze what needs to be fixed in your strategy and tweak where needed.
By including an offsite, managed cloud backup as part of your database recovery strategy, you can rest assured that your data will be safely backed up, and quickly restored.
