Overview

Your business data on your servers is normally one of the most important assets a company can have. Imagine how your business would operate without your data. Backing up your databases can be compared to backing up your business! The responsilibility of setting up and managing the backups is taked to the Database Administrator (DBA) or sometimes in the case of an SME, the business owner or the technical IT person in the company.

Backups

Database backups are executed periodically depending on your business requirements, frequency of data being updated – this could be mean a backup every hour or just once a day. Backups are normally executed to disk or can be straight to other media such as optical disk, tape or over a network to another server.

Frequency

Generally businesses have a backup policy in place, but many SME's do not. There are many website databases that are not backed up enough and in some cases only a full restore of the webserver will bring back the data. The problem here would be data changed on the database since this last server backup would be lost. If the webserver has many websites, then they will all be affected and the data available will be out of date.

A Typical Scenario

Imagine a theatre website with an online booking system and its database is nicely backed up every night in the early hours website activity is quiet then. The following evening, the hard disk fails on the webserver or the website is hacked and data deleted. The host provider replaces the hard disk and a system restore can be actioned from the last backup taken, along with the latest database backup taken the previous night. All restored OK but a record of all bookings for that day are lost. This means lost business and not very happy customers who believe they booked a show.

In this scenario, to avoid this, various solutions exist including disk mirroring, more frequent database backups, file synchronization to another server or database server failover to a warm standby server utilizing the log shipping methodology.

Restores

Restores are as important as backups. A backup is of no use if it cannot be restored. When did your business last test the restore functionality? How quick can a restore be performed? Where is your backup media – onsite, offsite, easily accessible? Do your backups contain all your required data? Does it also contain the schema data that the database server would need? Can a restore be actioned if your data is currently being appended?

There are many questions a business should ask itself with regards to the restore policy. If you have not tested restoring then action as soon as you can so you know in the event of a disaster you will be able to resume business operations effectively.

Storage

Consideration should be taken over the storage of the database backup media. If you backup to tape and then store the tapes local to the servers, then a risk exists if that area is destroyed by fire. It would be wise to keep a copy of the tapes in an accessible, secure offsite location or if there are business budget limitations and if trusted, a strong fireproof safe in another location in the building. You can even set-up a no cost agreement with another trusted company and store each others data backups.