Frequency
Redesign Backups are run nightly for all MCOECN hosted Redesign Deployments. Any given district will backup between the hours of 10:00pm and 5:00am.
Retention
Daily Backups of Redesign databases are retained for 60 days.
Location
Nightly backups are written directly to the backup system at the MCOECN 2nd Datacenter to create an offsite remote copy. That data is then replicated back to the primary data center for redundancy.
DR Test Restores
MCOECN does not conduct any scheduled DR restore tests for Hosted Redesign. Options are created in the vRealize Cloud Service Broker for ITC staff to create
Test and Training copies of their production databases, which create applications from scratch and restore production backups, the exact process that we would
use to recover a production deployment. On average, these are run 8-10 times per weekday across all hosted Redesign applications, so ITCs are performing
DR and recovery tests multiple times per week.
- NOTE: When creating Test/Train deployments, the most RECENT backup will be used to create Test/Train (usually the previous night's automated backup).
You can use the VRA Instant Backup item to create an up-to-the-minute backup for use with Test/Train if you need a more current backup for testing.
Please contact the MCOECN hosting team at dco-help@managementcouncil.org to assist with restoring older backups to Test/Train deployments. This is
currently a manual process.
Disaster Recovery
FUTURE: The MCOECN Data Center Operations team is working to create a Tanzu Kubernetes environment at the 2nd Data Center that could restore production
deployments of Redesign applications from replicated backups within minutes.
- Nightly backups will be stored on disk for 8 days. (NOTE: The previous setting prior to 4/15/2022 was 45 days on disk).
After a backup reaches 9 days old, it will be purged from disk. Most restores for recovery or SSDT troubleshooting occur within
1 to 3 business days, so 8 days of backups will cover the majority of restore needs.
- Disk storage locations for nightly backups will snapshot into the MCOECN backup system daily, and daily snapshots will be retained for one week.
These backups will be taken before any backups are purged from disk.
- Weekly backup snapshots will be retained for 8 weeks.
These backup parameters apply to both:
- Backups created for districts hosted at the MCOECN Data Center
- Backups for districts hosted at ITCs that are sent to the MCOECN Data Center for offsite replication.
Again, backups from the past 8 days will be available on disk and will not require intervention to restore from the backup system.
Any backups older than 8 days can be restored from the MCOECN backup system as needed, and any nightly backup up to 60 days
old (and a little over for good measure) can be recovered.
Below is a visual representation of the backup retention scheme, with the GREEN being stored directly on disk, and YELLOW being stored in the backup system.
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