Best Practices for Ensuring Solid Database Cloud Backups

Almost every organization has a database of data in the cloud. It is essential to protect this database by backing it up regularly. This can be done by database backups. However, when it comes to planning for database backups, there are several things and goals that should be kept in mind.

A database cloud backup protects and restores a database. The main purpose of creating a backup for your database is to ensure that all the critical files are accessible and it also helps in meeting compliance with the data regulations. Veeam backup to Azure can be used for backup.

Align Backup Strategy with Business Requirements

One of the most obvious goal of database backups is the commitment to fulfill recovery agreements.

With data backups, service level agreements can include acceptable recovery times and data access terms. If a recovery task becomes necessary, then the database will most likely be offline for a period of time. This has to be taken into account to when considering recovery of database backups.

Although current backups have reduced the amount of time it takes to recover from a data loss event, the recovery task can still take some time to complete. It is important to make sure that your data backup and recovery strategy aligns with the organization’s business requirements and that you are able to recover the whole database within the time allotted in the service level agreements.

Ensure Backup Architecture is Able to Keep Pace with Demand

Another important thing to note is that when planning for database backups, the backup architecture should be able to keep pace with the demand. For instance, it should not take more than 5 minutes to back up the transactions that have occurred in the last 4 or 5 minutes.

A backup strategy, whatever it is, cannot protect data if the data is consistently being created faster than it can be backed up.

Anticipate Future Workloads

Another important goal in protecting database backups is to anticipate future database workloads and ensure that the backup plan can efficiently address the company’s future data protection needs.

Remember that database workloads can change over time and if you do not cater this rapid change then you will constantly be playing catch up with the data.

Retention Policy for Backups

Backups can be of great size. Depending on the size of the backup data and change rate, it is very unrealistic to retain all the backups forever. There comes a time when a backup has outlived its usefulness. Like for example, an organization most probably won’t restore backups from 5 or 6 years ago.

This is why it makes sense to come up with a policy that allows an organization to efficiently use space by retaining backups for a specific period of time and discard old, unused versions.

Conclusion

Database backups have become just as important as regular backups. When it comes to database backup planning, backup architecture, workload, storage cost and size of the backups should be kept in mind. This will ensure solid database backups.

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