Developing a Strategy

You should develop and thoroughly test a backup and recovery plan before moving the software into a production environment. When testing, look for vulnerable areas by simulating as many possible failure scenarios as you can.

The following are suggested questions to consider when designing your strategy:

• What are the possible failure scenarios?
• What is the critical data?
• How often should you perform backups?
• How often should you backup services that don’t have a backup option?
• To what medium will you send the backup?
• How will you verify the automatic backups occurred?
• How will you ensure the backups are useable?
• How long will you save the backups before reusing the medium?
• Assuming failure, how much time will it take to restore from the most recent backup? Is that acceptable downtime?
• Where will you store the backups, and do the appropriate people have access to them?
• If the responsible system administrator is gone, is there someone else who knows the proper passwords and procedures to do the backups and, if necessary, restore the system?