What You Should Know About Backup Strategies
I think everyone today performs some level of backup whether it’s with the use of the native xcopy, robocopy to a local disk or external drive, or something more sophisticated such as an offsite Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR)/replication site. Either way, having a good back is only a great start and does not complete the intended process. As a business owner and/or operations manager, you must know and ask about the following. What about the ability to recover that backup?
This is where most companies fail as no recovery process is tested, proofed or validated. Some people liken this to sky diving without a parachute – you will jump out of a plane, but you may not successfully make it down safely.
So, what is your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) & your Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?
Both are needed to ensure you are achieving your intended business goals. The RPO is the value is the age of the data set. For example, data sets may be backed up every day; therefore, your RPO is one day. The RTO value is how quickly you want this data set recovered. For example, I want to recover my data set in four hours. Please keep in mind that a short RPO and quick RTO can be very costly while a short RPO and long RPO might be more reasonable for most companies.
- Have you tested, proofed and validated your backups and just as important, have you tested your recovery?
- Without testing the recovery process, you may only have half of the equation solved.
- Having now digested these basic backup process values, what is your RPO and RTO?
