This article is aimed at ICT staff and Systems admin staff. This information may be useful when reviewing disk space usage for the school's SEQTA instance and backup and disaster recovery plans.
SEQTA takes periodic 'database snapshots' which can be used used for point-in-time data recovery, database rollbacks, and where available restoration of data on a working system. These are not used for backup and disaster recovery which is managed by VM level and external backups.
School's are fully responsible to ensure regular backups and/or archive of backups of their data is taken.
- Database snapshots are taken periodically. These are are stored on the SEQTA VM which means if the VM becomes corrupt or is lost the External backups or a VM backup restore will be required. Where available database snapshots can be used for point-in-time data recovery.
-
External backups are managed in-house by the school. SEQTA can provide an external backup mechanism which can be used to backup the database and user files on a drive share provided by the school. To set this this up we require the address of the network share that is on a separate device from the SEQTA VM, the username and password and write permissions to the location. Backups cannot be saved to Google drive, Share point or the file.
- VM backups are managed in-house by the school. For effective disaster recovery a full backup of the VM is required, this give you the full flexibility to restore the system in case of disasters. This still locks up the data inside the VM and you'd be responsible for creating a consistent backup, but it is the most secure option. There are commercial backup solutions available for VMware and Hyper-V.
Backup rotation and frequency
Database snapshots
The frequency of the database snapshots are outlined below, this may be subject to change in future. These database snapshots are deleted once they reach the full rotation (eg. daily backups are taken for 7 days 'daily1', 'daily2' etc. then on day 8 'daily1' will be overwritten). The exception is the yearly backup, there will be one backup kept for each year.
In total there are 50 backups in a rotation. At present, this is set the same across the fleet any cannot be changed.
Please note that insufficient disk space may result in snapshots to fail. Where available snapshots can be used for point-in-time data recovery however for aforementioned reasons are not a backup solution.
Database snapshots are taken at the following times:
- 5x hourly backups (snapshots of the database): 5 times a day - 6:30am, 1:15pm, 3:30pm, 8:30pm, 11:30pm
(Before School, after morning timetable changes & absentees, after school, after most staff and students home submissions) - 14 x daily backup rotations: 2:00am
- 12 x weekly backup rotations: 1:15am Monday morning
- 9 x monthly backup rotation: 1:00am on the morning of the first day of the month
- 10 x yearly backup rotations: 0:15am on the morning of January 1st
External backups
- Midnight - School's may choose to allocate space on an external drive/share for Database snapshots and or User file backups. These can be set to a custom rotation as per the schools requirements.
Sync
- The sync runs at midnight. The sync is not part of the SEQTA backups.
Related articles
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.