Develop a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy for an SQL database.

Official answer

Define recovery point objective (acceptable data loss) and recovery time objective (acceptable outage) for specific failures: accidental deletion, corruption, host loss and wider compromise. Inventory database data, roles, configuration, encryption keys and external objects needed for a usable restoration.

Choose mechanisms supported by the engine. PostgreSQL logical dumps serve some restore/migration needs; physical base backups plus a complete retained WAL archive enable point-in-time recovery under the documented procedure. SQL Server full/differential/log backup terminology has its own recovery-model requirements and should not be applied universally.

Protect backups with restricted access, encryption and a separately recoverable key process. Keep suitable independent/offsite copies and retention, and monitor backup completion, archive continuity, storage capacity and failures. A replica is not a substitute for backups: erroneous changes or deletion may replicate too.

Regularly restore into an isolated environment, verify data and application invariants, and measure time to a usable service and the actual recovery point. Exercise loss of a backup segment, missing keys and recovery to before an unwanted change. Include dependencies and prevent restored test systems from sending real notifications or jobs.

Document selection of the recovery target, operator responsibilities, cutover, connection updates and post-restore reconciliation. A successful backup job or checksum alone does not prove that the system can meet its recovery objectives.