Kafka backup best practices come down to one principle: a backup you have not restored is a hope, not a backup. Retention deletes your data on schedule, replication copies your mistakes in real time, and neither can return a topic to the state it was in before an incident. These 10 rules turn Kafka backups from a checkbox into something you can bet an on-call shift on.

Kafka geo replication copies topics between clusters in different regions or datacenters, so a regional outage does not take your streaming platform with it. In-cluster replication (RF=3) protects against broker loss inside one failure domain; geo replication protects against losing the domain itself. This guide compares the four patterns, shows what MirrorMaker 2 setup looks like over a WAN, and covers the failure mode replication cannot solve.

Kafka replication across data centers comes down to one architectural decision: run a single stretched cluster spanning your datacenters, or run independent clusters connected by asynchronous replication. Stretched clusters give you zero data loss but demand low-latency links. Separate clusters tolerate WAN conditions but accept a non-zero recovery point. This guide covers both designs, when each wins, and how to build the second one with MirrorMaker 2.