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Backup Strategies

2 min read

💾 Backup Strategies

Backups are Essential

Data backups are critical for recovery from failure, ensuring compliance with regulations, and maintaining business continuity. Neglecting proper backups is a leading cause of data loss.

Backup vs. Replica

  • Backups:

    • Point-in-time copies stored separately from the production environment.
    • Optimized for long-term retention and historical recovery.
    • Typically used to restore data after corruption, accidental deletion, or disaster.

  • Replicas:

    • Near real-time copies used primarily for high availability.
    • Shared resources; often remain online and accessible.
    • Ideal for failover but not a replacement for true backups.

Use backups for recovery and replicas for continuity. Both serve different but complementary roles.

Types of Backup

  • Full:

    • Captures all data at once.
    • Time-consuming and storage-intensive.
    • Forms the baseline for other backup types.

  • Incremental:

    • Stores only changes since the last backup (full or incremental).
    • Fastest to perform, minimal storage.
    • Requires chaining for recovery.

  • Differential:

    • Saves changes since the last full backup.
    • Larger than incremental but simpler to restore.

  • Single-file (Incremental):

    • Consolidated incremental backups into a single container.
    • Easier to manage and restore.

Agent-Based Backup

  • Characteristics:

    • Installed within guest OS.
    • Enables file-level and application-aware backups (e.g., databases, email).

  • Considerations:

    • Higher impact on VM or host resources.
    • Greater flexibility for selective restores.

Image-Based Backup

  • Characteristics:

    • Captures entire VM disk and configuration.
    • Creates snapshots independent of the guest OS.

  • Use Cases:

    • Fast full-system restores.
    • Disaster recovery scenarios.

Image-based backups are typically mounted on a proxy server for processing and data transfer.

Cloud-Based Backup (BaaS)

  • Benefits:

    • On-demand scalability.
    • Reduced infrastructure overhead.
    • Integrated with cloud-native features (e.g., immutability, geo-redundancy).

  • Use Cases:

    • Ideal for remote workforce and decentralized environments.
    • Supports compliance and long-term archival needs.

Backup Architecture Overview

Clients → Backup Server → Storage Node → Backup Device
  • Clients: Endpoints or systems being backed up.
  • Backup Server: Manages scheduling, indexing, and orchestration.
  • Storage Node: Handles data transport and transformation.
  • Backup Device: Final destination for storing backups (disk, tape, cloud).

Example

In a typical enterprise setup, VMs are backed up via image-based tools to a central backup server, which then archives the data to a cloud provider or tape library for long-term storage.

For maximum resilience, combine multiple backup strategies tailored to your workload criticality, compliance obligations, and recovery time objectives (RTOs).

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