Putting together a backup strategy for your production box
Backups are worth in GOLD when you need them.
I simply cannot stress on the fact that if you are running a production web application and you are not backing up your critical data – you are bound to shoot yourself in the foot – sooner or later.
Something similar happened to us when we faced a similar situation… though we were backing up everything we wanted, we were not testing the integrity of our backed up data. AND when the D-Day came, we weren’t able to restore our data – even when we had our backups ready.
Lucky for us, we were able to recover.
Hence, I have put together a simple, no fancy – backup strategy which ping you on email if it detects that your backup isn’t working.
- Use astrails-safe gem to create and schedule rotating backups on S3 and local file system (you can add sftp uploads as well)
- Post backup, perform an integrity check on your tarballs and email a list of any corrupt files to yourself (using actionmailer gem).
- TODO – Re create the tarballs which fail the integrity check and upload them back to S3/local.
I’m planning to release this strategy with code into public domain… probably on a free weekend.
Please do share your comments on how you backup your critical data.
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