Module Title: dgt_sys04 – Backup and Restore
Module Description:
Data is a critical asset for individuals and organizations. Without a backup strategy, data loss can lead to significant financial losses, reputational damage, and operational disruption. This module, “dgt_sys04 – Backup and Restore,” gives participants the knowledge and skills needed to design, direct and verify effective backup and restore solutions on Linux systems.
True to the Academy’s approach, you first learn how full, incremental and differential backups work and what each tool does internally. Then you never type a tar, rsync or restic command yourself: you tell the machine what to protect, how often and for how long, read the commands and schedules it sets up, and, above all, ask it to perform a real restore that you check file by file. A backup is only as good as a restore you have verified.
Module Objectives:
- Understand the Importance of Backups:
- Explore why regular backups are crucial for data integrity, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
-
Discuss real-world scenarios in which a lack of adequate backups led to catastrophic outcomes.
-
Introduction to Backup Concepts:
- Learn key terminology such as full, incremental, and differential backups, and the restore process.
-
Understand backup policies, retention strategies, and compliance requirements.
-
Directing Backup Tools in Natural Language:
- TAR: Understand how TAR creates and extracts archives, a tool for file compression and archiving, and check the archives the machine produces.
- Rsync: Learn how Rsync achieves efficient data synchronization and incremental backups over networks, and verify that a sync the machine sets up copies exactly what it should.
- Bacula: Learn about Bacula, an open-source network backup solution with features such as centralized management of backup tasks.
-
Restic: Explore Restic, a tool for backing up files in a distributed manner with strong encryption support.
-
Developing Backup Strategies:
- Learn how to design backup solutions tailored to specific needs, considering factors such as data criticality, system architecture, and resource availability, and how to express them as clear instructions for the machine.
-
Apply best practices for testing backups and ensuring successful restoration.
-
Security Considerations in Backups:
-
Discuss the importance of securing backup data through encryption, access controls, and secure storage locations.
-
Practical Labs and Case Studies:
- Natural-language labs in which you ask the machine to create, manage, and restore backups with the tools above, then review its commands and verify the restored data.
- Analyze case studies that highlight both successful and failed backup implementations.
Target Audience:
This module is intended for system administrators, IT professionals, DevOps engineers, and anyone responsible for data management on Linux systems. A good theoretical grounding in Linux administration is recommended to follow the technical aspects of this module.
Module Outcomes:
By the end of this module, participants will be able to:
– Articulate the critical importance of having a backup strategy.
– Select appropriate tools and methods for creating backups tailored to specific organizational needs.
– Instruct the machine to implement secure and efficient backup solutions using TAR, Rsync, Bacula, and Restic on Linux systems, and verify its work.
– Design restore procedures, have the machine execute them, and confirm that data is correctly recovered from various types of backup media.
The module covers the design, implementation and verification of backup and restore procedures that keep an organization’s data protected and recoverable.
The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy