Backup Strategies and Best Practices

Back up Strategies & Best Practices

Identifying a reason why you or your organization wants to backup and also make sure you're not giving away your data is important – a lot of security motivation in NSA news recently

• many groups are not motivated to think about back-ups or security in general
• would rather have someone do it for them
• often motivated by a known threat

First step is to figure out What Data you have & where it lives

• create an inventory of where you have data and where it is stored
• something like an Online Accounts Inventory

For Data that you want to keep – what options seem reasonable?

What are safe strategies – different kinds of data have different characteristics

different characteristics of the data means that you may think about how it is backed up in different ways

• if data set only grows
  • raw video archive

• if data set changes
  • a database of contacts
  • snapshots of the changes

• video
  • multiple pieces of physical media
  • different physical locations
  • hard drives (cheap drives)
  • Rsync – command line tool to backup changes

• need to establish process around consistently backing-up
• make it easy for the people to back-up, like a button

• online database

Questions to ask:

• Is the data that you want to back up all in 1 places?
• How does the backup work?

Complete the Back-up Process - can you restore from the back up - can you test that the back-up in functional - if you use external hard drives, how to

S.M.A.R.T. Mon (monitor) Tools - smartmontools - can ask the hard drive to tell you things like temperature, when the last read error was, let me know when the disk is going to fail

• git (revision control)

Databases

• 2 common ones
  • mySQL
  • PostGres – postgresql.org

Incremental Backups

• Rdiff
• Differential

• it is really important that you understand how the backup that you are running is working, is it sync, mirrored, iterative, just tracking changes... etc

Restoring

• database backups
  • have a machine not on internet
  • recreate database & then push the backup to it and see if it works
  • you could also run tests to see if it works

Tools that do autobackup testing -

• test your restores
• you tell them the kind of thing that you think you are backing up

Everything time you bring in someone new, make sure they can restore from a back – test that someone could do it (tests if it is possible & likely)

For developers – understanding the functional dependencies that the code relys on

Backing up Social Media – what is necessary to backup?