Understanding the basics of backups

Backups can be used for multiple purposes. The main purpose of backups is to reduce the risk of losing data if your primary copy gets lost or damaged. Another use of backups is to seed an acceptance environment with real-life data. Depending on how you develop, you might have different setups for development, quality assurance, acceptance, and production. Restoring a backup from production to acceptance can be done to allow for performance tests and functional tests with real-life data.

This has to be done carefully, as this may or may not be allowed by regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). For example, if you are working with Personally Identifiable Information (PII), then you may need to mask names, email addresses, and other pieces of PII with dummy values.

Also, you must not send...