Types of backups

Several events can corrupt or delete important data. Some technical problems that may cause data loss are:

• A power failure during a disk write

• Hardware failures (such as disks and motherboards)

• Crashing of the operating system

• MariaDB or storage engines bugs (yes, like all programs, MariaDB has bugs)

But even a human being can cause damage. A cracker can use a software vulnerability to destroy some data. Or, we can accidentally issue a DROP DATABASE command on a database that we did not want to erase.

Since there is no way to be sure that these things will not happen, we need to be prepared to restore all critical data by performing regular and automated backups.

A backup can be performed in several ways. No backup method is better than others in all situations. The choice depends on many factors. Before deciding on a backup plan, we should ask ourselves questions such as:

• How critical is our data?

• How often is our data updated?

• Can the server slow down or be temporarily stopped during...