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Data Recovery & Backups

Module Introduction

What is Data Recovery?

The process of trying bto restore data after an unexpected event that result in data loss or corruption.

  • When an unexptected event occurs, your main objective is top resume normal operations as soon as possible, while minimizing the disruption to business functions.

  • The best way to prepared for a data-loss event is to have a well-through-out disaster plan and procedure in place

  • Disaster plans should involve making regular backups of any and all critical data that’s necessary for your ongoing business process.

  • Post-mortem
    A post mortem is a way for you to docuement any problems you discovered along the way, and most importantly, the way you fixed them so you can make sure they don’t happen again.

Backing Up Your Data

  • backup system

    • Email databases
    • Sales databases
    • Financial spreadsheets
    • server configurations
    • databases
  • cat pictures(not)

  • Local storage

    • Pros
      data is physically nearby low bandwidth needs

    • Cons
      Data loss due to damage at location \ Needs large amounts of bandwidth

Backup Solutions

  • Magnetic data Storage Tapes

  • rsync
    A file transfer utility that’s designed to efficiently transfer and synchronize files between locations or computers

  • Time machine

  • Backup and Restore

Testing backups

  • Restoration procedures
    should be documented and accesible so that anyone with the rioght access can restore operations when needed

  • Disaster recovery testing

Types of Backup

  • Ways to perform regular backups

  • Full backup

  • Differential backup

  • Regular implmented backups

  • It’s good practice to perfoem infrequennt full backups, while also doing more frequent differential backups

  • File compression

  • Reduntant array of independent disks(RAID)
    a method of taking multiple physical disks and combining them into one large vital disk

User backups

  • Cloud storage
    • Drpbox
    • Apple iCloud
    • Google Drive

What’s a Disaster Revocery plan?

  • Disaster recovery plan
    a collection of documented procedures and plans on how to react and handle and emergency or disaster scenario, from the operational perspective.

  • Precentive measures
    Any procedures or systems in place that will proactively minimize the impact of a disaster

  • Detection measures
    Meant to alert you and your team that has a disaster has occured that can impact operations

  • Enviromnetal sensors

  • Flood sensors

  • temp and Humidity sensors

  • Evaccuation Procedures

  • Corrective or recovery measures
    Those enacted after a disaster has occured

  • single point of failure

designing Disaster Recovery Plan

  • Risk assessment
    Allow you to prioritize certain aspects of the organizations that are more at risk if there’s an unforeseen event

  • Designing a Disaster Recovery plan

    • Perform Risk Assessment
    • Determine Backup and recovery Systems
    • Determine Detection & Alert Measures & Test measures
    • Determine recovery measures

what’s a Post-Mortem?

We create a post-portem after an incident, an outage, or some event when something goes wrong, or at the end of a project to analyze how it went.

Writing a Post-mortem

  • Brief summary example

    • What the incident was
    • how long it lasted
    • What the impact was
    • How it was started
  • Dates, times, timezones

  • Deailed timeline

  • Root cause

  • What can be learnd ?

  • Resolution and Recovery efforts

  • Action to Avoid Same Scenario