Designing a backup and recovery solution

When developing a comprehensive strategy for backing up and restoring data, you must first identify possible failure or disaster situations and their potential business impact. In some industries, you must consider regulatory requirements for data security, privacy, and records retention.

Backup and recovery processes should include the appropriate level of granularity to meet recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for the workload and its supporting business processes, including the following:

• File-level recovery (for example, configuration files for an application)

• Application data–level recovery (for example, a specific database within MySQL)

• Application-level recovery (for example, a specific web server application version)

• Amazon EC2 volume-level recovery (for example, an EBS volume)

• EC2 instance-level recovery. (for example, an EC2 instance)

• Managed service recovery (for example, a DynamoDB table)

Be sure to consider all the recovery requirements for your solution and the data dependencies between various components in your architecture. To facilitate a successful restore process, coordinate the backup and recovery between various components in your architecture.

The following topics describe backup and recovery approaches based on the organization of your infrastructure. IT infrastructure can broadly be categorized as on-premises, hybrid, or cloud native.