Offsite Backup Strategy

We place backup copies in geographically separated locations — minimum 500 miles apart for natural disaster resilience. AWS backups replicate to a different region (us-east-1 to us-west-2). For multi-cloud, primary in AWS with backup copies in GCS or Backblaze B2. We map your data residency requirements to specific geographic locations and document the physical separation for compliance.

Single-provider risk is real — an AWS billing dispute or account compromise affects all regions simultaneously. We configure backup copies to at least two providers: primary to S3, secondary to Backblaze B2 or Wasabi. Backup tools like Restic and Borg support multiple backends natively. Each provider has independent credentials, encryption keys, and access controls. Provider-level outage becomes a restore-source decision, not a data loss event.

For critical data, we implement air-gapped backups — copies that are physically disconnected from any network. This can be automated with scheduled exports to encrypted USB drives, tape libraries, or cold storage devices that are write-once and stored offsite. Air-gapped copies are the last line of defense against sophisticated attacks that compromise both production and backup environments.

Offsite backups must be independently restorable. We test restoring from each offsite location without access to the primary site — simulating a complete primary site loss. Restore procedures include: credential access from a separate secrets store, network configuration for the recovery environment, and application deployment from the offsite backup. Each test is timed and compared against RTO targets.