Planning your backups
A well-planned backup strategy is vital to pull through operational adversities with minimal turn-around.
For an online business, data is currency. One of the ways to determine the value of each data entity is to attach a monetary value to it, and ascertain how costly or expensive its loss can mean to you.
While data will be the driving concern, a backup also introduces other costs you may need to consider while devising a strategy.
A full backup:
Consumes a lot of disk space on your backup server
Demands time and effort
A well-planned backup strategy should adequately address the following.
Classify or prioritize data in terms of criticality of operations
Think of your data as 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. It is advisable to refrain from high activity on the files being backed up so that data consistency is not compromised.
Determine the backup destination
An off-site or remote backup is recommended for data that is critical to your operations. A remote backup is advised for important files.
A local backup can be taken for smaller and less critical backups. However. these decisions are very contextual.
Determine the mode of transfer
You can choose to FTP or Download to back up your files. FTP is more reliable and faster and the recommended 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, it is probable that you lose revisions that occurred after the last back up.
Schedule backups
Schedule backups to run regularly at an appointed time, typically when activity on the system is low. Scheduling backups frees you to attend to other tasks and also eliminates the need to remember to back up your files manually.
Backups can be scheduled to run:
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Frequency of changes to a file or data entity is a good indicator of how often a backup must be created.
Important: For backups scheduled to run weekly or monthly, note that data revisions made in the interim time-period [or since the last backup] will be lost if you perform a restore from the last backup.
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.