DB Backup Recovery

Overview

Use this skill to define backup and restore behavior that is credible under incident pressure, not only compliant on paper.

Scope Boundaries

• Data loss tolerance and recovery time objectives must be formalized.
• Backup policy is changing due to scale, compliance, or architecture change.
• Teams need confidence that restore procedures actually work.

Core Judgments

• RPO/RTO targets per data class and business workflow.
• Backup modality: full, incremental, log-based, snapshot, or hybrid.
• Retention and immutability policy by legal and business requirements.
• Restore topology: point-in-time restore, region restore, partial table restore.

Practitioner Heuristics

• Start from restore requirements, then derive backup schedule.
• Separate operational backups from archival/legal-retention copies.
• Encryption, key rotation, and access logging apply to backups too.
• Recovery procedures must assume partial infrastructure outage, not ideal environment.

Workflow

1. Define data criticality tiers and required RPO/RTO per tier.
2. Select backup mechanisms and cadence aligned to write patterns.
3. Define retention lifecycle and deletion rules.
4. Design restore paths for common and worst-case incident scenarios.
5. Establish ownership and escalation for recovery execution.
6. Document assumptions that invalidate the current strategy.

Common Failure Modes

• Backup success is monitored but restore path is untested.
• One global retention policy ignores data criticality differences.
• Recovery relies on undocumented manual knowledge.

Failure Conditions

• Stop when RPO/RTO cannot be mapped to concrete mechanisms.
• Stop when backup policy has no feasible restore path.
• Escalate when recovery guarantees exceed infrastructure capability.