I sound like a broken record with every client when I talk to about the resilience of their production environments. It’s very simple in theory, however in practice many organizations fail.

Ask yourself these checklist questions for your MySQL backup and recovery process?

1. Do you have MySQL backups in place?
2. Do you backup ALL your MySQL data?
3. Do you have consistent MySQL backups?
4. Do you have backups that include both static snapshot and point in time transactions?
5. Do you review your backup logs EVERY SINGLE day or have tested backup monitoring in place?
6. Do you perform a test recovery of your static backup?
7. Do you perform a test recovery to point in time?
8. Do you time your backup and recovery process and review over time?
9. Do you have off-site copies of your backups?
10. Do you backup your primary binary logs?

In the past month I’ve discovered clients that have an online only business (i.e. Their MySQL data is their only tangible asset), they perform daily backups but they don’t have binary logging enabled. I’ve also discovered an example of backup logs not being checked, and an underlying mysqldump error was resulting in an incomplete backup, yet the backup script apparently completed successfully.

Disaster is inevitable.

If you don’t score 8 or better in the above checklist in your business, you are at higher risk. If you are a owner/founder/executive this should keep you awake at night if your not sure of your business viability. If your organization needs help, please contact me for assistance.

• Can you recover from a small or large disaster?
• Do you have confidence in your DR plan?
• Do you know how long your DR plan will take.
• What does your online business look like or operate during your DR time?