Backup
Your insurance copy of the data: kept somewhere a mistake, attack or outage in the main system can't reach, and proven by actually restoring from it.
Updated October 2026 · with examples from our own builds
What does backup mean in practice?
A backup is only useful if it is separate and restorable. Separate means another account, provider or region, ideally protected against deletion; restorable means someone has actually brought data back from it and timed how long that took.
Ask what is backed up, how often, where it lives and when a restore was last tested. Databases are the obvious item; uploaded files, configuration and the keys needed to decrypt anything are easy to forget.
For files, versioning and object lock add another layer: old versions are kept, and locked objects can't be deleted or changed before their retention date, even by an administrator.
Backup at a glance
- Must be
- Separate from the main system and tested by restoring
- Easy to forget
- Uploaded files and the keys to decrypt them
- Extra protection
- Versioning and object lock
Where has backup come up in our builds?
Storafleet was built for teams whose backups sit on one provider and production data on another: it runs one-time migrations or scheduled syncs between any two connected buckets and sets versioning and Object Lock retention without hand-written JSON. For AWS, the setup stack can create the bucket with versioning and default encryption on.
Each night the previous day's audit-log hashes are rolled into a signed Merkle root and shipped to Backblaze B2 under a compliance-mode object lock with ten-year retention, and three failed shipments in a row raise a critical alert.
The August 2026 handover included a full export of the media bucket, alongside the accounts, signing material and runbooks.
Common questions about backup
How do I know my backups actually work?
Restore from one. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, so schedule a test restore into a separate environment and record how long it took.
Should backups live on the same cloud account as my app?
Ideally not, and preferably with a lock against deletion, so one compromised login or mistaken command can't remove both copies.
Related terms
Sources
Planning a product and not sure where backup fits? Ask us, or browse all 116 terms in the glossary.