MCOECN Hosted State Software Backup Methodology

Frequency

Backups are run nightly for all MCOECN hosted State Software applications. Any given district will backup between the hours of 10:00pm and 5:00am.

Retention

Daily Backups of State Software application databases are retained for 60 days.

Location

Nightly backups are written directly to the backup system at the MCOECN 2nd Datacenter to create an offsite remote copy. That data is then replicated back to the primary data center for redundancy.

DR Test Restores

MCOECN does not conduct any scheduled DR restore tests for Hosted State Software. Options are created in the Aria Cloud Service Broker for ITC staff to create
Test and Training copies of district production databases. https://cloud.managementcouncil.org/

These Test and Train options create applications from scratch and restore production backups into them, using the exact same process that we would use to recover a production deployment. SSDT support staff also create Jira support deployments many times per day to troubleshoot Jira ticket issues.

Systemwide, these restored tests are created between 30-90 times per day on average, so ITCs and SSDT staff are actually performing DR and recovery tests potentially 100-200 times per week.

NOTE: When creating Test/Train deployments, the most RECENT backup will be used to create Test/Train (usually the previous night's automated backup).
You can use the Aria Service Broker Instant Backup item to create an up-to-the-minute backup for use with Test/Train if you need a more current backup for testing.
Aria Service Broker item State Software Test gives you the option to restore any available backup from the last 60 days into a test deployment, including backups created by Instant Backup.

Disaster Recovery

As of early 2025, the MCOECN Data Center Operations team is working to create a Tanzu Kubernetes environment at the 2nd Data Center that could restore production
deployments of State Software applications from replicated backups within minutes.