Disaster Recovery Planning for MongoDB

1. Introduction

Disaster Recovery Planning for MongoDB is vital to ensure data integrity, availability, and minimal downtime during unexpected events. This lesson covers essential concepts, strategies, implementation steps, and best practices for disaster recovery.

2. Key Concepts

• Disaster Recovery (DR): A strategy to recover and protect a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
• Backup: A copy of data stored separately from the original.
• Replication: The process of sharing information across multiple MongoDB instances to ensure redundancy.
• Failover: The process of switching to a standby database in the event of a failure.

3. Disaster Recovery Strategy

To develop a disaster recovery strategy for MongoDB, consider the following:

1. Identify critical data and applications.
2. Determine recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
3. Choose a backup strategy: full, incremental, or differential backups.
4. Implement replication across multiple data centers or cloud regions.
5. Regularly test your disaster recovery plan to ensure its effectiveness.

4. Implementation Steps

The following steps outline how to implement a disaster recovery plan for MongoDB:

1. Set up a backup schedule using mongodump:

mongodump --uri="mongodb://user:password@host:port/dbname" --out=/path/to/backup

2. Configure replica sets for automatic failover:

rs.initiate(
              {
                _id: "rs0",
                members: [
                  { _id: 0, host: "primary:27017" },
                  { _id: 1, host: "secondary1:27017" },
                  { _id: 2, host: "secondary2:27017" }
                ]
              }
            )

3. Monitor replication status:

rs.status()

4. Test failover scenarios by shutting down the primary node and ensuring automatic failover to the secondary.

5. Best Practices

• Regularly update your MongoDB deployment.
• Keep backups in multiple locations.
• Document your DR plan and ensure all team members are trained.
• Implement automated monitoring and alerting for system failures.

6. FAQ