SUS04-BP08 Back up data only when difficult to
recreate
Avoid backing up data that has no business value to minimize storage resources requirements for your workload.
Common anti-patterns:
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You do not have a backup strategy for your data.
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You back up data that can be easily recreated.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: Avoiding back-up of non-critical data reduces the required storage resources for the workload and lowers its environmental impact.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
Avoiding the back up of unnecessary data can help lower cost and reduce the storage resources used by the workload. Only back up data that has business value or is needed to satisfy compliance requirements. Examine backup policies and exclude ephemeral storage that doesn’t provide value in a recovery scenario.
Implementation steps
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Classify data: Implement data classification policy as outlined in SUS04-BP01 Implement a data classification policy.
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Design a backup strategy: Use the criticality of your data classification and design backup strategy based on your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Avoid backing up non-critical data.
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Exclude data that can be easily recreated.
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Exclude ephemeral data from your backups.
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Exclude local copies of data, unless the time required to restore that data from a common location exceeds your service-level agreements (SLAs).
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Use automated backup: Use an automated solution or managed service to back up business-critical data.
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AWS Backup is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services, in the cloud, and on premises. For hands-on guidance on how to create automated backups using AWS Backup, see Well-Architected Labs - Testing Backup and Restore of Data
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Automate backups and optimize backup costs for Amazon EFS using AWS Backup
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Resources
Related best practices:
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