Establish and Document the Application's Backup and Restore Procedures

This chapter explains how to establish and document how an Application’s data and configuration are backed up and restored.

Backup and Restore vs. Disaster Recovery

Backup and restore protects against the loss or corruption of data and configuration, for example through accidental deletion, a faulty Release, a storage failure, or malicious action, by allowing them to be restored to a known good point. Disaster Recovery, addressed in the next chapter, restores the Application’s ability to operate after the loss of an entire environment or site. The two are related, since Disaster Recovery usually depends on backups, but they answer different questions and require separate documentation.

Establish Backup and Restore Procedures

Establish, with the Operations and Support Team(s) and consistent with the Application’s Recovery Point Objective and retention rules:

• What is backed up: databases, files, configuration, and any other state.

• How often, and how long backups are retained.

• Where backups are stored, and how they are protected, including copies kept separately from the primary environment.

• How a restore is performed, for the whole Application and for individual data, and how long it takes.

• How backups and restores are tested, and how often.

• Who is responsible for each part.

For SaaS and vendor-hosted Applications, establish what the vendor backs up, what the enterprise can restore and how, and whether the enterprise needs its own additional backups or data exports.

Document and Share the Procedures

Record the backup and restore procedures, and the results of each restore test, in the Operational section of the Application Documentation. Record Instance differences explicitly. Update the procedures with every Release that changes the Application’s data or storage.

Best Practice: Establish and Document the Application’s Backup and Restore Procedures

It is a best practice to both establish and document the solution for protecting an Application’s data: define what is backed up, how often, for how long, and where, define how restores are performed, and test restores regularly, recording the results.

Benefits: Documented and tested restores turn data loss from a potential disaster into a routine recovery. Testing is the key: an untested backup is only a hope, and recording restore test results proves to the business and to auditors that recovery actually works.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices addresses assessing application resilience and recoverability, including Recovery Point Objectives. The Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) Framework for Software Systems addresses recoverability requirements.