Question

I’ve got a multi-user application having some critical data of the users. I am working on the backup and disaster recovery plan for the application..

Would like to know some best practices regarding this..

Thanks.

Answer 1

Note: you may want to include failover in your critical data management.

Backup is often used for copy of your data ready to be restored.

Failover and DRP restore the service (not just the data), since a new server is available:

• within few minutes for failover, since it is generally on the same nettwork, and its name does not have to be published on the various DNS
• within a few hours in case of DRP

For pure backup strategy, I go with daily incremental backup, and weekly full backup.

However, we also have a SRDF connection allowing a real-time data replication with our remote data center used for DRP.

Now, backup + failover + SRDF (for DRP) might be overkill for development data, but can be justified for production data (needed to restore the service running in production).

So to better refine your policies, you need to clearly analyze what your data represent.