Backup and recovery processes are critical to all IT applications. Therefore they are an important part of the business continuity plan of organizations.
A well-considered and proven MySQL disaster recovery system can make the difference between a small failure and a serious threat to an organization. Also, backups are an integral part of organizations’ database operations, as security of their business becomes a priority to stave off damages when any catastrophe strikes.
A survey by Unitrends finds that 93% of small business store their data or backups in the cloud.
In case of disasters, it is necessary that the recovery time objective and recovery point objective of an organization is predefined. This helps organizations in recovering faster from any impending disaster. A key focus area for organizations is to have a thorough understanding of MySQL disaster recovery architecture.
Protecting Databases through MySQL Disaster Recovery
Database backups are divided into logical and physical backups. Logical backups protect against the loss of individual data points while physical backups protect against data loss. For example, a server hardware failure. In order to recover a crashed database, organizations can either leverage binary logs that capture real-time transactions or replication if implemented as a part of MySQL Database disaster recovery plan.
Binary Logs are beneficial to organizations for the ‘point-in-time’ recovery of databases. Replication is beneficial to organizations for making the real-time data available in case the master server gets crashed or unexpectedly shuts down. Organizations can set up the ‘master-slave’ and ‘master-master’ replication in MySQL disaster recovery.
Following is an overview as to how the replication would benefit organizations in terms of disaster recovery, on both the cloud as well as the on-premises environment.
- Organizations must set up the data recovery database instance as the replica of their production database instance. The organizational data must be replicated from the mast host system to the replicated destination system. When organizations come across a replica failover, the up-to-date MySQL disaster recovery database instance enables organizations to start protecting the environment.
- To use replication as a backup solution, organizations must replicate their data from the master to slave and then back up the slave data. The slave can be paused and shut down without intervening the operations of the master. This allows organizations to produce an effective snapshot of live data that would otherwise require the master to be shut down.
The three aspects that underpin disaster recovery are automated backups, manual backups, and read replicas. There are several factors associated with restoring a database from a server crash scenario, including the data size, memory allocation, and buffer pool. While the recovery in an on-premises environment requires extensive manual efforts and time, it is fast in case of the cloud since most of the operations run in the background.
To Sum Up
Most organizations vary in their approach to backups, constantly seeking a combination of server image, logical, and physical backups. These backups are then stored in multiple locations to avoid any local or regional disasters. It also means that organizations can restore the data in the shortest amount of time, thereby avoiding major downtime and any impact on their business.
Cloud, cloud disaster recovery, Cloud Security, Data Security, Digital Transformation, Network security
