This blog post discusses the business continuity plan around MySQL backups, and how organizations should think about them.

During the years I’ve worked in IT, I’ve learned that backups sometimes are a conceptual subject in organizations. Many companies have them, but don’t document the associated business continuation plan for them. I experienced this the hard way many many years ago, somewhere around when MySQL 5.0 was still widely used.

In most organizations, there are a couple of business continuity subjects that should be described internally. For example, what is the recovery time objective and what is the recovery point objective. Let’s go a bit deeper into both concepts:

Recovery Point Objective:

A recovery point objective describes the utter limit of time data …