Looking to improve our backup strategy and want to know what DevOps backup and recovery tools people are actually using successfully.
We need something that works well with cloud infrastructure (AWS specifically) and can handle databases, application data, and configuration files.
What features are must-haves vs nice-to-haves? How do you handle testing your backups regularly? And what about cost considerations - any tools that offer good value?
For DevOps backup and recovery tools, we use Velero for Kubernetes backups. It handles persistent volumes, configurations, and even entire namespaces. The ability to schedule backups and restore to different clusters has saved us multiple times.
For databases, we use native backup tools (pg_dump for PostgreSQL, mysqldump for MySQL) combined with AWS Backup for storage management. The key is testing restores regularly - we have a monthly backup fire drill" where we restore random backups to ensure they work.
Cost-wise, consider retention policies carefully. We keep daily backups for 30 days, weekly for 3 months, and monthly for a year. Anything older gets archived to cold storage.
We evaluated several DevOps backup and recovery tools and settled on Duplicati for file-level backups and BorgBackup for system-level backups. Both are open source with good encryption and deduplication.
The must-have feature for us was incremental backups with deduplication. Our backup storage costs dropped by 70% when we switched from full backups every day.
For testing, we have automated restore tests as part of our CI/CD pipeline. Every week, a job randomly selects a backup, restores it to a test environment, and runs smoke tests. If the restore fails, we get alerted immediately.
For AWS-specific DevOps backup and recovery tools, we use AWS Backup combined with custom Lambda functions. AWS Backup handles EBS volumes, RDS databases, and DynamoDB tables out of the box.
The nice-to-have feature that became must-have for us: cross-region replication. We backup to a different AWS region for disaster recovery. Yes, it doubles storage costs, but being able to recover in another region during a regional outage is worth it.
We also backup configuration separately from data. Terraform state, Kubernetes manifests, pipeline configurations - these get versioned in Git and backed up to S3 with versioning enabled.