Data being critical in every enterprise IT, it needs to be protected. This protection is done at various levels, by creating a cluster/replica to ensure more than one hot/warm copy of the data exists.
In order to have a cold copy of the data for disaster recovery, a database backup is normally taken. Database backups and restore are possibly one of the most important operational tasks of a DBA. Trove helps automate the entire process, from backing it up, encrypting data at rest, and also restoring the backup. Trove also supports incremental backups of your databases and supports creating a new instance from an existing backup.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Formulating a backup and recovery plan
- The concept of strategies in Trove
- Configuration aspects
- Backing up and restoring Trove guest instances
There are two kinds of backups: full backup and incremental backup. Trove helps with both of the backups (with certain data stores), as we will see later in the chapter. A plan needs to be formulated in order to successfully execute these.
The frequency of both or either of these backups needs to be based on the following parameters:
- Importance of the data
- Frequency of changes in the database
- Recovery objectives (RTO, RPO)
Based on the preceding parameters, we will need to derive the following key points:
- Frequency of full backups
- Frequency of incremental backups (if any)
- Frequency of testing the backups (by restoring the database)
- Need for offsite shipping of the database backup
- Frequency and modes of offsite shipping
This plan is applicable to any form of backup and this will help us with scripting and automating the backup tasks.