Backups & Disaster Recovery

Owned by Scott Le Brun (Deactivated)
Last updated: Oct 10, 2023 by David Rogers

DR planning

Disasters will happen. We don’t know when they will hit or the extent, but with a good DR plan in place we can be prepared. Synergetic is a critical system in the environment and needs to be considered and covered under the DR plan.



The DR plan needs to cover the ‘Recovery Point Objective’ (RPO) and ‘Recovery Time Objective’ (RTO). These objectives are usually set by business continuity guidelines.

  • Recovery Point Objective – the maximum period which data might be lost and the point in time to restore data.
  • Recovery Time Objective – the maximum period the service is permitted to be offline during a recovery process.

Note: The Recovery Time Object is concerned only with the restoration of data. Consideration should be given to the situation where procurement and configuration of replacement hardware is required. If required, the procurement and configuration of hardware will extend the service outage.

Synergetic Database Backup

The Synergetic database is the crucial piece of Synergetic ecosystem. Applications can be re-installed and configured as required and are not as critical.

By default, Synergetic database backup plans include taking full backups daily at 10pm and transaction log backups every 15 minutes. As long as the backups are available and intact, there would be a maximum of 15 minutes lost data after an event.

In the worst-case scenario of local storage and backups becoming unavailable (ie: fire, flood), the data loss may be great and may need to be recovered from an off-site backup.


The backup rule of 3. (Also known as the ‘3-2-1’ rule)

  • 3 copies of the data (original plus two backups)
  • 2 different media types (disk + tape or cloud backup)
  • 1 copy kept off-site (cloud backup also covers this)


Make sure the backups taken are intact, readily accessible and stored separately away from the system that is being backed up. The best backups are 'air-gapped', meaning they are offline and unable to be overwritten. We have received notices of ransomware and other malicious activities that have targeted backup systems as well as the primary systems. Beware!

Important: By default, Synergetic plans back up the database. It is the customer's responsibility to ensure that an 'air-gapped' copy of this backup is maintained.

Synergetic Application Backup

All Synergetic Applications reference the database. There is little difference in recovery time between installing and configuring a new copy of the application versus restoring the application from backup.

The application folders contain all configuration files for that application. Consideration should be given to backing up the Synergetic windows customer folder, and the web server inetpub folder.

It is the customer's responsibility to maintain application backups. 

Recovery

If an incident occurs and a recovery is required, contact our Support Service Desk immediately for advice and assistance. Locate the backups and make them readily accessible to restore. It is not advisable for customers to attempt recovery unassisted.

Test

Backups must be regularly tested. Restoring to a sandbox environment regularly is essential. This is to test that the backups themselves are sufficient and to accurately judge if the expected RPO and RTO's are met.

Additional considerations

Encrypted backups

By default, the Synergetic database backups are not encrypted. It is possible to encrypt the backups.  The Microsoft best practice article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/backup-restore/backup-encryption?view=sql-server-ver15 offers guidance on this practice. Contact our Support Service Desk if you require any assistance with this.