The Three Disaster Recovery Levels

There are currently three levels of protection for Disaster Recovery (and backups). It is recommended that the data administrator try to achieve all if it is possible. These levels are:

1. Data Level. This is the user’s and application’s data protection. It can usually be accomplished by simply backing up database files and dumps and other types of systems.

2. System Level. It aims to reduce system recovery time to as little as possible. In this category techniques like filesystems snapshots, Windows systemstate, bare-metal backup, and virtual machines export should be used.

3. Application Level. The aim is to continue the application consistent and operational. In this case, restoring critical data needs to be more specialized and with the shortest restoration time possible, using backup-specific plugins or Named Pipe commands that achieve consistent backups and restore of application objects directly to their instances without the need to restore to disk and then to import. Special features like Point-in-Time-Recovery databases are also highly desired.

It is very common, for example, to schedule dump type backups of databases to provide a data level restore; a backup of your entire bare-metal machine or VM export to quickly restore your system; another backup of the databases’ transactions for agile PITR restoration and disaster recovery of the service itself.

In addition to having life licenses and working with the open data recording standard, EBacula has several cross-platform plug-ins that guarantee these different levels of protection. Check out some of them:

Directory Server: allows the administrator to restore object-level data and accurately manage restore conditions.
SAP: Bacula Enterprise’s SAP plug-in is designed to implement the SAP back-end interface to simplify backup and restore through traditional SAP database tools.
SAP HANA: the SAP Hana plugin was developed to implement the official SAP Hana interface to facilitate backup and restore procedures through the SAP Hana database tools.
MySQL: Bacula Enterprise’s MySQL plug-in provides important functionality such as retrieving users, roles, and databases at any point in time.
PostgreSQL: Bacula Enterprise’s PostgreSQL plugin was developed to simplify the backup and recovery procedure for your PostgreSQL cluster.
Incremental Accelerator for NetApp: enables efficient backups of NetApp archives with large volumes (High Count of Files or High Files Count).
VMware: The VMware plugin provides bare metal recovery for vSphere, while host-level backup simplifies data protection for critical applications (including granular restoration from an image backup).
Delta: Built to analyze differences between block-level files. Generates binary packages for backup. It allows a considerable reduction of space of the files that had little modifications between two backups.
SAN Shared Storage: designed to ensure that in a SAN environment only one server can connect to each device at a time.
VSS: this plugin allows you to back up more than fifteen Windows components (Exchange, Sharepoint, @SYSTEMSTATE, among others) that are based on the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy service, providing specific facilities for each different type of service.
NDMP: This plugin allows you to back up NAS devices using the NDMP protocol.
S3/Azure/Cloud Storage: was developed to back up virtual machines, da, abases and other applications – or just regular files – and copy them to a cloud, public or private, through an S3 interface.
MS SQL Server: this plugin enables advanced backup of MS SQL servers and databases.
Hyper-v: this plugin performs full backups through the VSS API. Perform backups of the full virtual machine images. Retrieves the complete image of the virtual machine, in addition to the disk images. Snapshots for VSS-based applications.
KVM: file-level backup. Full, differential and incremental backups. Self-discovery of virtual machines.
Xen: provides bare metal restoration of virtual machines for Citrix XenServer. Allows online snapshot-based backup of any guest virtual machine.
Proxmox: this plugin promotes disaster recovery (DR) of virtual machines, including QEMU and LXC guests. Online snapshot-based backup of any guest VM, including QEMU and LXC. Full image backups. Ability to restore full virtual machine image.
Swift OpenStack: This plugin retrieves objects one by one during the backup phase. Any container and/or metadata of objects modified since the last backup will be saved during differential or incremental backups.
BWeb Management Suite: the centralized administrative interface that enables intuitive, easy-to-configure, deploy, manage, view, and analyze all of your Bacula Enterprise infrastructure.
BCloud: the BCloud service is a user-oriented web frontend, based on the Bacula Enterprise REST API. It is designed to grant backup administrator activities directly to the end user by promoting Backup as a Service (BaaS).