For business continuity, valid backups and restores play a crucial role and are important for any industry. It is always to check whether the database backup performs either to a disk or tape to prevent data loss. The best practices assure a valid data backup and assist the effectiveness of database backup and recovery. To data recovery during any disaster, these database backup practices will prepare to respond and handle such situations.
Why do you need to have Database Backup?
Your data is the most essential to run your business most effectively and just need a backup for your database. No matter whatever the data is either sensitive content or popular videos, it boosts your e-commerce business. No one wants to discover new data when you lose it in uncertain conditions or server crashes. Everyone recommends keeping the data with protection and encryption, and here are the database backup best practices to save your data.
Database Backup and Recovery Best Practices
Consider taking a look at these best practices when it comes to securing your data with complete backup and recovery.
1. Use Remote Storage
A remote backup is a critical factor for a backup solution. Your original data will backup and will store in the same disk with protection. Even if your central server is compromised, the backups in off-server and off-site will remain viable and allow you to recover the entire data. Off-site backups are important for disaster recovery, whether it is a cloud-based server or a physically dedicated server.
2. Take Backups Frequently and Regularly
An assurance of frequent and regular backups of your data will prevent data loss. A Complete managing server will provide complete flexibility to your control panels for account-level backups for a scheduled backup.
You can create a timeline on how you backup your data regularly when you schedule a backup. The critical data is required to update continuously and also need to schedule backup up to date. In this case, a continuous backup will always work, and the static data requires a daily or weekly basis of data backup. The primary thing is you have to select the backup that meets your organization’s requirements and then proceed.
3. Consider Retention Span
It is vital to consider after determining the frequency that how long each backup will retain. Due to limitations in the storage space, it is challenging to keep every backup forever, and various backup solutions offer different retention schedules. The other backups such as monthly backups for a few months or maybe years, weekly backups for a month, daily backups for a week, and hourly backups daily. For all these kinds of backups, the schedule allows having multiple and recent backups with a requirement of instance recovery of data.
For a business, database backup best practices will prefer retaining specific backups like monthly, bi-annual, or certain periods. These backup types will not last forever as they are selected based on industry requirements and standards. For financial institutions or companies, backup retention will have strict requirements.
4. Keep Backups Encrypted & Protected
There are instances where it is not sufficient for an off-site location to backup all your critical information. It is always good to have data security with excellent protection and encryption services. For the safety of holding your backups and adding encryption to the data is the next big thing. During the storage of data, backup and encryption are the primary concern to recognize the businesses.
5. Store Backups on RAID Arrays
You have to store your backup for a bit of extra redundancy on RAID arrays. In the RAID array, the backup solution will distribute all the data to two or more drives to backup and allow for reliability, better performance, and more extensive backup sets. The advantage of RAID arrays is that it protects the data from the failure or loss in a single drive.
The other name for redundancy is high availability infrastructure as its primary function is to protect the backup data from the loss/failure or risk of going offline during the disaster.
6. Scheduling database backups
A simple and efficient way to backup your data is possible with a scheduled backup. It is user-friendly and gives access to other features like encryption, cloud archiving, and automatic test/verification. It is recommended that you must have defined backup retention and a daily backup. If you don’t want to risk deleting files accidentally or disk corruption, you have to recover your data by scheduling them. However, it ultimately depends on the requirement. There is a possibility to backup manually so that the data will be reproducible or can duplicate the original ones like example cached data, report generation, and thumbnails. To recover various more databases; there is a possibility to run extra or several scheduled incremental backups easily.
7. Stack Your Backup Solutions
It is always best to use multiple backup solutions because they may differ based on how they treat the data. Let us take an example, the backups for Liquid Web’s Dedicated backup solution will take your entire server, and the backup data will store in a remote location safely.
cPanel backups alternatively will take from your cPanel accounts and also will store them in local or any other remote locations. For every user, the availability of local reserves through cPanel and the users who have multiple accounts on one server, these cPanel backups are very useful. But the only requirement is to restore one account.
It is recommended to backup both full images of your server along with the snapshots of your cPanel accounts because it offers different benefits of backup solutions. No matter whatever the disaster hits your data because the stacking of your backup solutions will ensure that your data is supposed to recover quickly and efficiently.
8. Disaster recovery planning for databases
If you want to restore your data quickly, there are many possible ways to backup files in a place as compression and restore them promptly. It is a horrible idea if we talk about disaster recovery and may not be the best option. You may face different troubles like server crashes, network issues, and the data will not be accessed. These situations happen when you work with a smaller service provider and a single data center. It is always better to store in an external location. The preferable external storage locations are Azure cloud storage, Amazon s3 services, and Google storage.
The main responsibility of an organization’s database administration is to develop backup plans and conduct effective backup solutions. The backup management actively monitors the backup schedule based on the requirements and has to be alert from any failure or data loss. It is always useful to backup to a physical disk and then archive for the disaster recovery process.