Data Protection and Recovery Strategies in AEMaaCS

[#1]

Data Protection and Recovery Strategies in AEMaaCS

by @daniel-strmecki

Introduction

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) provides organizations with a secure and highly available platform for managing digital experiences. One of the key operational concerns for any enterprise CMS platform is how to protect against data loss and recover from mistakes, whether it’s accidental content deletion, corruption, or a problematic deployment operation. Unlike on-premise AEM, where backup strategies could vary across organizations, AEMaaCS centralizes this responsibility with Adobe and offers built-in backup and restore capabilities. Understanding how this process works, when to use it, and how to automate it helps teams make smarter backup and recovery decisions.

Key points

For enterprises running critical digital experiences, protecting against accidental deletions, data corruption, failed imports, or even regional outages is essential. Adobe’s approach ensures both resilience and flexibility, giving teams multiple recovery options depending on the severity of the issue.

How Backup and Restore Works

• Backups are handled automatically by Adobe; customers don’t need to maintain their own policies.

• Restores are initiated via Cloud Manager, rolling the content repository back to a chosen point in time without affecting code deployments or AEM version.

• This separation keeps developer code safe while reverting only content, though any authoring done after the restore point is lost.

Types of Backups

• Point-in-Time (PIT): Restore to any specific moment in the past 24 hours; ideal for recent accidental deletions or bad imports.

• Last Week Snapshots: Twice-daily backups available for up to 7 days (excluding the last 24 hours); useful when problems surface after a delay.

• Offsite Backups: Continuous replication to a remote region for production environments, retained for 3 months; ensures disaster recovery in case of regional outages.

Alternatives to Full Restore
Full restores are disruptive since all post-restore content is lost. Adobe recommends selective recovery where possible:

• Package Manager – reinstall missing or corrupted packages.

• Restore Tree – bring back a deleted page tree without impacting unrelated content.

• Content Copy with Content Sets – copy content from Production to lower environments (or vice versa) to restore missing pieces.

• Automation via Content Sets API – schedule sync jobs with CI/CD pipelines, ensuring Staging mirrors Production for UAT and regression testing. Notifications and verification checks increase reliability.

Temporary Environment Restores
For large projects where full rollbacks are not feasible, Adobe Support can provision a temporary environment from a PIT snapshot:

1. Adobe restores Production content (up to 7 days old) into a temporary environment.

2. Teams access the environment, locate lost or corrupted content, and package it.

3. The package is imported back into Production without affecting ongoing authoring.

4. Temporary environments are then decommissioned by Adobe.

This non-disruptive method allows precise recovery of only what is needed, avoiding large-scale rollbacks. 

Best Practices for Enterprises

• Use selective restores first to avoid unnecessary disruption.

• Keep Staging and Production aligned with automated content copy jobs.

• Integrate restore processes into CI/CD pipelines to reduce manual work.

• Escalate to Adobe Support for temporary environment restores in P1 scenarios.

• Treat backup and restore not just as a safeguard but as part of business continuity planning.

Full Article

Read the full article on https://meticulous.digital/blog/f/data-protection-and-recovery-strategies-in-aemaacs to find out more.

Q&A

Please use this thread to ask questions relating to this article.

[#2]

Thanks @daniel-strmecki , for such a comprehensive breakdown of backup and recovery options in AEMaaCS. The part about the temporary environment restoration was particularly insightful. It’s not something many teams think of until they actually face a P1 scenario. Your explanation really clarifies how selective recovery can save teams from unnecessary disruption.

In your experience, do most enterprise teams lean towards using point-in-time restores and selective recovery methods (like Package Manager or Restore Tree), or do they still tend to escalate quickly for full restores? Curious how others in the community balance speed vs. disruption when deciding which recovery path to take.

[#3]

Thanks @kautuk_sahni, I think everyone prefers selective recovery methods with minimal disruption. In the last 5 years working with AEMaaCS, thankfully, I've never had a scenario that would require a full restore.