Backup Strategy
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A backup strategy is your plan for making copies of everything important and being able to restore them. The 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different media types, 1 offsite. Test your restores regularly because a backup you can't restore is just wasted storage. Ask any DevOps engineer about their backup horror story — they all have one.
Real Talk
A backup strategy defines what data to back up, how frequently, where to store backups, how long to retain them, and how to verify restorability. It encompasses full, incremental, and differential backups, retention policies, encryption, and regular restore testing. The 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 media, 1 offsite) is a widely adopted baseline.
When You'll Hear This
"We follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy with daily snapshots to S3 and weekly offsite." / "A backup strategy without restore testing is just a hope strategy."
Related Terms
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is your plan for when everything goes absolutely wrong — data center floods, region-wide outage, ransomware attack.
Replication
Replication means automatically copying your database to one or more other servers in real time. If the main server dies, a replica takes over.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
RPO is how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster, measured in time. If your RPO is 1 hour, your backups need to run at least every hour.
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is Amazon's giant file locker in the sky.