Backup and Disaster Recovery

Table of Contents

• [Overview](#overview)
• [When to Use](#when-to-use)
• [Quick Start](#quick-start)
• [Reference Guides](#reference-guides)
• [Best Practices](#best-practices)

Overview

Design and implement comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies to ensure data protection, business continuity, and rapid recovery from infrastructure failures.

When to Use

• Data protection and compliance
• Business continuity planning
• Disaster recovery planning
• Point-in-time recovery
• Cross-region failover
• Data migration
• Compliance and audit requirements
• Recovery time objective (RTO) optimization

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# postgres-backup-cronjob.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: backup-script
  namespace: databases
data:
  backup.sh: |
    #!/bin/bash
    set -euo pipefail

    BACKUP_DIR="/backups/postgresql"
    RETENTION_DAYS=30
    DB_HOST="${POSTGRES_HOST}"
    DB_PORT="${POSTGRES_PORT:-5432}"
    DB_USER="${POSTGRES_USER}"
    DB_PASSWORD="${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"

    export PGPASSWORD="$DB_PASSWORD"

    # Create backup directory
    mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"

    # Full backup
    BACKUP_FILE="$BACKUP_DIR/full-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).sql"
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Perform regular backup testing
• Use multiple backup locations
• Implement automated backups
• Document recovery procedures
• Test failover procedures regularly
• Monitor backup completion
• Use immutable backups
• Encrypt backups at rest and in transit

❌ DON'T

• Rely on a single backup location
• Ignore backup failures
• Store backups with production data
• Skip testing recovery procedures
• Over-compress backups beyond recovery speed needs
• Forget to verify backup integrity
• Store encryption keys with backups
• Assume backups are automatically working