My server crashed, help me restore it

-"Help me restore my server it crashed"

-"Where did you stored your backups?"

-"On the server"

Does this dialouge sounds similar?

I often run into situations where application administrators and/or database administrators uses backup to local server storage as a backup for the application or databases.

It is also common that one thinks that what you store on the disks are protected anyway by a server backup function. I will come to different scenarious where this can be of risk.

I have server backup, so I don't need any specific tool to backup my application

My hypervisor or file backup tool copies all data on the server, so I don't need to bother about how to protect my application or database data as everything that I store on the server is protected anyhow, right?

Well first this might be right, if the application and databases supports VSS, and one uses a hypervisor or a backup tool that communicates with VSS to initiate snapshot consistent backups. But there are some more things to be aware of.

How should I take care of the transactional data in the database? So that I can restore to a point in time that are between the application consistent snapshots.

Can I perform redirected restore to other places, if I need to?

Can I perform granual restore, picking individual objects / tables etc?

Also some operating system doesn't have VSS. If no integration is done with the application or databases, than that is equal to fuzzy backup. Some applications and databases supports fuzzy backups, while some does not support fuzzy backup.

Fuzzy backup is when a backup copy process copies application or databases data without informing the application or database about this copying process.

Note that taking a fuzzy copy, might make it impossible to perform to any point in time using transactional data (recovery).

Overall recommendation: Take application consistent snapshots, or application aware backup, such as Spictera Snapshot or Spictera SPFS.

I backup my application to local storage, so I don't need any backup agent

Taking backup of application or databases to local storage is good, it is easy to use as most part of people know how to use it. But it also comes with risks.

If the application backup is not copied off host, than it is a risk that one can loose all of its backup data.

A local application backup can be read writeable, which doesn't protect from malware, ransomware, bugs, human errors etc.

If there is a server backup, than these backup copy tasks might be running at the same time, which might lead to that the ongoing application backup that has copied 50% of its data will have 50% of its application backup data on the off host location. In other words, the backup data is unusable, or not fully usable. If that is the only local server backup copy, than no restore can be made. If there on the other hand are multiple copies of the backups, than one can use the previous working backup copy, which might lead to that the business looses too much of its data.

Overall recommendation: Use a backup agent, or synchronize the backup copy process, or use Spictera SPFS.