Backups

A quote from a well-known maxim is as follows:

"Hope for the best, plan for the worst."
– John Jay (1813)

This should be our approach when designing our backup strategy for MongoDB. There are several distinct failure events that can happen.

Backups should be the cornerstone of our disaster recovery strategy, in case something happens. Some developers may rely on replication for disaster recovery, as it seems that having three copies of our data is more than enough. We can always rebuild the cluster from the other two copies, in case one of the copies is lost.

This is the case in the event of disks failing. Disk failure is one of the most common failures in a production cluster, and will statistically happen once the disks start reaching their mean time...