Paranoid and Proud of It: Planning Your Backups

n my first article on this subject, I discussed the need to have a healthy dose of paranoia when planning how to protect your systems and information. I also demonstrated some basic steps for risk mitigation in general. In this article I apply some professional paranoia to one of the most important tasks a DBA is faced with—creating a proper backup and contingency plan. Additionally, I also share some of the feedback I received from readers of the first article in the series.



As a DBA, you know that one of your primary responsibilities is planning backups. But creating a correct backup solution is not as simple as it sounds. There are many issues to be taken into account.



There are several steps to follow when setting up a comprehensive backup plan:

1. Develop a healthy sense of paranoia when planning how to protect your systems and information (covered in Part I).
   
2. Formulate tough questions about how much downtime and data loss are acceptable to your business.
   
3. Ask the proper business people with authority to weigh the financial considerations of the answers they give.

This article provides you with a framework for creating a backup and contingency plan that will suit your situation.