Modern Data Protection

Chapter 4. Backup and Recovery Basics

Now that I’ve defined what backup and archive are and how to keep them safe, we need to drill down further into some basic backup and recovery concepts. I’ll start with discussing the all-important concept of recovery testing, followed by the concept of backup levels. I then look at many backup system metrics, especially the concepts of RTO and RPO and how they (more than anything else) determine backup design. I then talk about image-level versus file-level backups and how the contents of backups are selected. The first, and possibly most important basic backup concept, however, is that all backups must be tested.

Recovery Testing

There is no more basic concept of backup and recovery than to understand that the only reason we back up things is to be able to restore them. And the only way you’ll know whether you can restore the things you’re protecting is to test your ability to do so. Regular recovery testing should be a fundamental part of your backup system.

Besides testing the validity of the backup system and its documentation, regular testing also helps train your personnel. If the first time they’re executing a big restore is when they’re doing it in production, such a restore will be a much more stressful situation and more likely to be error prone. If they’ve done such a restore multitudinous times, they should just be able to follow their usual procedure.

You should regularly test the recovery of anything and everything you are ...