Comment by unoti
8 years ago
You made a lot of insightful point here, but I'd like to chime in on one important point:
> - Unless you have full time DBAs, do use a managed db like RDS, so you don't have to worry about whether you've setup the backups correctly.
The real way to not worry about whether you've set up backups correctly is to set up the backups, and actually try and document the recovery procedure. Over the last 30 years I've seen situations beyond counting of nasty surprises when people actually try to restore their backups during emergencies. Hopefully checking the "yes back this up" checkbox on RDS covers you, but actually following the recovery procedure and checking the results is the only way to not have some lingering worry.
In this particular example, there might be lingering surprises like part of the data might be in other databases, storage facilities like S3 that don't have backups in sync with the primary backup, or caches and queues that need to be reset as part of the recovery procedure.
"Backups are a tax you pay for the luxury of restore" [1]
A lot of people pay the tax and never even try the lux.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/3/how-google-backs-up...
Good blog post. This, I suggest, is its most essential point:
"Prove it. If you don’t try it it doesn’t work. Backups and restores are continually tested to verify they work"