Aem backup disaster recovery

AEM Backup & Disaster Recovery

Purpose

Design and implement backup strategies, disaster recovery plans, and business continuity procedures for AEM environments including repository backup, content recovery, and failover architecture.

When to Use (Triggers)

• User mentions "backup," "disaster recovery," "DR," "failover," or "business continuity"
• References to repository backup, restore procedures, or data protection
• Questions about RTO/RPO requirements, backup scheduling, or recovery testing
• Requests involving high availability, geographic redundancy, or failover configuration
• Discussion of data loss prevention, backup validation, or restore procedures

Core Capabilities

• Design backup strategies for all AEM data (repository, datastore, configurations)
• Implement automated backup scheduling with retention policies
• Configure high availability and failover architectures
• Build and document disaster recovery runbooks
• Test and validate recovery procedures with measurable RTO/RPO

Domain Knowledge Required

Technical Foundation

• Backup types: full, incremental, differential, snapshot-based
• Recovery objectives: RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
• High availability patterns: active-active, active-passive, cold standby
• Data consistency during backup (quiescing, point-in-time snapshots)

AEM-Specific Context

• Oak TarMK online backup (FileDataStore + SegmentNodeStore backup)
• AEM Cold Standby (TarMK standby sync)
• Document store (MongoDB) backup patterns for DocumentMK
• Backup of external datastore (S3, Azure Blob, shared filesystem)
• AEM Cloud Service managed backup vs. on-premise manual backup
• Restore procedures and data consistency verification

Implementation Approach

Step 1: Requirements Analysis

Define recovery objectives and scope.

• Establish RTO and RPO for each environment (author, publish)
• Identify critical data: repository content, configurations, datastore binaries
• Determine compliance requirements (retention periods, geographic restrictions)
• Assess acceptable data loss and downtime per tier

Step 2: Backup Architecture Design

Plan the backup approach for each data component.

• Configure Oak online backup for repository segments
• Set up datastore backup (filesystem copy, S3 versioning, or snapshots)
• Plan configuration backup (OSGi configs, dispatcher, infrastructure-as-code)
• Design backup storage location (offsite, different region, different provider)

Step 3: Automation & Scheduling

Implement automated backup execution.

• Schedule Oak online backup via cron/maintenance window
• Automate datastore backup aligned with repository backup timing
• Implement backup rotation and retention (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Configure backup monitoring and failure alerting

Step 4: High Availability Configuration

Set up failover capabilities.

• Configure TarMK Cold Standby for author instance failover
• Set up publish farm with load balancer health checks
• Implement dispatcher-level failover for publish tier
• Design cross-region failover for geographic disaster scenarios

Step 5: Recovery Testing

Validate recovery procedures regularly.

• Schedule quarterly DR drills with documented runbooks
• Test full restore to isolated environment
• Measure actual RTO/RPO against targets
• Document and remediate gaps found during testing

Quality Checklist

• Backup covers all data components (repository, datastore, config)
• Backup consistency verified (no corrupt or partial backups)
• RTO/RPO measured and within business requirements
• Backup retention meets compliance requirements
• Automated alerting on backup failures
• Recovery procedures documented in runbook format
• DR tested quarterly with documented results
• Backup storage in separate failure domain from production

Related Skills

• aem-monitoring-alerting (backup monitoring)
• aem-versioning-content-rollback (content-level recovery)
• aem-upgrade-patch-management (safe upgrade with backup)

Example Use Cases

1. Enterprise DR Strategy: Design a multi-region disaster recovery architecture for a critical AEM author instance with 4-hour RTO, 1-hour RPO, automated failover, and documented recovery runbooks tested quarterly.
2. Cloud-to-On-Premise Backup: Implement backup strategy for AEM Cloud Service content with nightly exports to on-premise storage for compliance requirements, including content package extraction and verification.
3. Ransomware Recovery Plan: Create an air-gapped backup architecture with immutable backups, integrity verification, and a tested recovery procedure that can restore a clean AEM instance within 8 hours.

Notes

• AEM Cloud Service manages backups automatically — focus DR planning on content recovery, not infrastructure
• Oak online backup creates a consistent snapshot — do NOT use filesystem copy while AEM is running
• Cold Standby provides near-real-time replication but requires dedicated standby instance
• Test restores are critical — a backup that hasn't been tested is not a backup