Uli Wallscheid, Data Protector Product Manager, OpenText, explains in his new blog article available backup and recovery strategies, offering insightful recommendations to ensure a robust and secure process.

A backup and recovery strategy is the overarching construction making sure your data is protected against typical challenges. It relies on a good foundation as well, which is made of server, storage and network redundancy like clustering, replication, and network teaming. This foundation protects against physical damage and platform unavailability.

However, there are many more ways your data can become unusable. For instance, many data loss issues are caused by human error, and I guess you have heard of RansomWare and other attacks as well. A well-planned backup and recovery strategy helps you out of here no matter what the root cause for data loss was.

The basics

Let’s start with some basics. Starting a backup and recovery strategy means backing often enough and fast enough. Your requirements of RPO and RTO are driving these two parameters. To be able to restore to the desired points in time you need to backup with a frequency that supports the approach. Backup once a day might not be good enough depending on the data type. A file system backup is a dedicated point-in-time, an application backup might be more flexible because of log file replay for finer granularity. Check this parameter with reporting giving you clear indication that you are within spec. Change your backup frequency and check again if previously breached RPO requirements are now met.

Backup performance is the next parameter you should look at. This is defining what to expect for RTO. Do not assume that backup/restore performance is something you can just turn on or off. It is the result of your investment into the hardware infrastructure and backup/restore features available. If you are protecting your data over LAN you have to consider it being congested at times, a dedicated backup LAN may help. OpenText Data Protector also offers backup/recovery of FC SAN or iSCSI avoiding the usually bottlenecks of physical connection and protocols (SCSI being faster than TCP/IP for large block transfers). If backup/restore is to slow to meet an RTO you may have to switch from LAN to SAN or you may have to increase I/O performance of the source and target storage system. Know your bottlenecks! This RTO service level is also about testing. Watch your historic backup/restore performance with DP Reporting Server to predict if you are approaching an RTO limit.

Some backup strategies have been invented saving expensive tape media space or reduce workload on the backup client. Make sure to understand the implication for recovery. If you created a long and complex chain of full, differential and incremental backups it will hurt the recovery process a lot. Your RTO may become unreachable. A broken recovery chain may also prevent certain RPO’s being reachable. See also Data Protector case studies.

The strategies

Now, let’s assume you have made up your mind about the points from above and the general decision of focusing more on backup or recovery. My tip: Start with a recovery discussion first, then adapt backup to those needs. RPO and RTO should be covered by this time. You backed up data sitting on a medium ready to be restored. The strategic challenge from here is making sure restores are always possible by providing media copies. And since a certain location could have been hacked, you may want to offload a copy to a remote place. There could be many answers to this challenge, and some have been forged into standards.

Data Protector supports many backup strategies including: 

• 3-2-1 Backup Strategy 
• 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Strategy 
• 4-3-2 Backup Strategy 

These backup strategies are described and explained in detail in this article: 'OpenText Data Protector︎ Cyber Security And Resiliency'.

Again, the above strategies need to be supported by smart infrastructure decisions. In some areas you may need to storage systems with replication capabilities moving already deduplicated data to another destination. And you want your backups software taking control here, so you don’t have to perform time consuming and error-prone store and import tasks.

Where replication Is not possible you need a Media or better Object copy capability making sure you can copy your data to any backup destination irrespective of vendor and platform. With this you have the toolset for 3-2-1 and 3-2-1-1-0 where 0 is to be addressed with DP’s Object Verification feature (like mentioned in this article).

You can find Object Copy and Object Verification in the Object Operations drop-down of the Data Protector GUI like show below.

Object Copy: Set up object copy - Data Protector (microfocus.com)

Object Verification: Set up object verification - Data Protector (microfocus.com)

Summary

• Set your basics starting with restore/recovery. Adapt your backups accordingly.
• Know that backup decisions drive restore capabilities and granularity.
• Apply industry standards like 3-2-1-1-0.
• Tape is still a strategic item since no other technology gives you true air-gapping.
• Reduce steps, avoid manual tasks.
• Don’t rely on snapshots, they are not a 1:1 copy of your data!

Resources

General Data Protector information, landing page:

Enterprise Data Backup Software: Data Protector | OpenText (microfocus.com)

Data Protector Practitioner Portal, includes support matrixes:

Home - Data Protector (microfocus.com)

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The Online Community Team