Planning your backups
A well-planned backup strategy is vital to pull through operational adversities with minimal turn-around.
In an online business, data is currency. Poor decisions can prove to be expensive. One way to determine the value of each data entity is to attach a monetary value to it, and ascertain how expensive its loss can mean for your business.
A full backup consumes time, effort and disk space. While data will be the driving concern, a backup also introduces other costs that you may need to consider while devising a strategy.
A full backup:
Consumes considerable disk space on your backup server
Demands time and effort
Note: It is recommended that you communicate your backup plans to site users, so that they can plan their activities and backup schedule. For example, if you plan to back up a site monthly, then conveying your schedule to the site users can help them plan daily or weekly backups as needed.
A well-planned backup strategy should adequately address the following.
Classify or prioritize data in terms of criticality of operations
Think of your data in terms of business currency, and evaluate the cost in time, effort and money required to replace or recover the data. Setting a value on your data assets can help you establish an informed backup strategy for your data.
Ensure data consistency
Consistency of data can be affected if you have open files that are being changed, when a backup is in progress. It is advisable to refrain from high activity on the sites being backed up so that data consistency is not compromised. It is recommended that users of your site be aware of your backup schedules so that they can ensure data integrity.
Choose an appropriate backup destination
An off-site or remote backup is recommended for data that is critical to your operations. A local backup can be taken for smaller and less critical backups. However, these decisions are very contextual.
Choose an appropriate mode of transfer
You can choose the FTP or Download option to back up your files. FTP is recommended as a more reliable and faster option. Large backups to a remote server must be transferred using FTP, while small files may be downloaded to a backup location.
Determine an appropriate time to perform back ups
Take backups during a period of low activity. Note that changes or revisions to data, while the backup is in progress, poses the risk of introducing data inconsistencies that can corrupt a backup. Also, changes done while the backup is in progress may not be backed up. As a result, you can lose revisions that occur after the last back up.
These situations can be preempted if site users are aware of your backup schedules and refrain from high activity during backup.
Schedule backups
Schedule backups to run regularly at an appointed time, typically when activity on the system is low. Scheduling backups frees up your staff to attend to other tasks and also eliminates the need to remember to back up the site manually.
Backups can be scheduled to run:
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Frequency of changes is a good indicator of how often a backup must be taken. A daily backup is recommended when changes are large and frequent.
Important: When backups are scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly, note that data revisions made in the interim time-period [since the last backup] will be lost if your system crashes or files get corrupted.
Determine the frequency of backups
An informed assessment of what should be backed up and how frequently it must be backed up, is an important strategy decision. Ideally, critical files must be backed up daily; files that can be replaced with minimal effort and loss of time can be backed up weekly or monthly.
Try dummy restores from the backup
After taking a backup, perform a dummy restore and check the file sizes to ensure that the backup will restore successfully when needed.