Backup/Restore Strategy for Cloud Disaster Recovery

Backup and Restore as an AWS Disaster Recovery Foundation

Production Operations

• Traditionally, data is backed up to tape and sent off-site regularly. This can take a long time to restore your system in the event of a disruption or disaster, and there is a risk in handling and transporting physical tapes.
• Instead of writing data to tape, then transferring the tapes to the Disaster Recovery environment, data can be written & recovered to Amazon S3 or other Cloud Storage types, which removes the risk associated with transporting tapes, and allows restore directly to the target location in the event of a restore.
• Transferring data to and from Amazon S3 is typically done through the network, and is therefore accessible from any location.
• There are many commercial and open-source backup solutions that integrate with Amazon S3, and this most likely includes your current backup/restore application. Hararei recommend using MSP360 as it is independent of the type of storage or Cloud provider you may use.
• You can use AWS Import/Export to transfer very large data sets, or by shipping AWS Snowball storage devices directly to AWS.
• For longer-term data storage where retrieval times of several hours are adequate, there is Amazon Glacier, which has the same durability model as Amazon S3. Amazon Glacier is a low–cost alternative starting from $0.01/GB per month. Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3 can be used in conjunction to produce a tiered backup solution.
• AWS Storage Gateway enables snapshots of your on-premises data volumes to be transparently copied into Amazon S3 for backup.
• You can use the gateway-VTL configuration of AWS Storage Gateway as a backup target for your existing backup management software. This can be used as a replacement for traditional magnetic tape backup.

Various combinations of existing backup AWS services, Operating System utilities or existing backup applications can be used to move data from On–Premise locations to the Cloud

Different network types can also be used to connect the company premises to the Cloud locations, including AWS Direct Connect, public Internet or SDWAN, or physical devices can be used to transport the data

Recovery

Recovery using this strategy is the slowest of all the DR strategies as significant amounts of data may need to be restored. It is also likely to be the cheapest solution, and may be the right solution for second tier applications that can afford a longer RTO. In this strategy, data is restored from backups.

Restores are performed over the network to the target location. Sufficient allowance must be made to transfer the data volumes from the AWS Region where the data is stored to the target environment