backup-recovery Skill

Goal

"A backup is not a backup until you have successfully restored from it."

Steps

1. Define Objectives

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Max data loss. (e.g., "1 hour", "5 minutes", "0 seconds").
• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Max downtime. (e.g., "4 hours", "30 minutes").

2. Strategies

• Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR): Archive WAL/Binlogs to replay transactions up to a specific second. (Critical for RPO ~0).
• Snapshot: Daily/Hourly full disk copy. Low impact, slower restore.
• Logical Dump: pg_dump / mysqldump. Portable, slow for large data.

3. Storage & Retention

• Immutability: Backups must be Read-Only (WORM) to prevent Ransomware encryption.
• Off-site: Replicate to a different region/cloud provider (3-2-1 Rule).
• Retention: Keep Dailies for 7 days, Weeklies for 1 month, Monthlies for 1 year.