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Design a Backup and Restore Strategy for a Stateful Service is a hard low-level design interview question covering operational design, sre, devops, backup, disaster recovery — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Design backup and recovery for a stateful service holding a few terabytes. At most five minutes of data may be lost and the service must be recoverable within an hour. There is no maintenance window, so backups are taken from a live system. Recovery must cover hardware failure, human error such as a bad migration, corruption, and an attacker who has obtained production credentials. Explain how you know a backup can actually be restored.
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