No. HA is not a back up method. It is simply a High Availability in case one Controller fails. If you accidently delete an Application, it will render to the HA in seconds and it is gone forever with no chance of recovery.

A good practice for backups is the following:

- To balance the risk of data loss against the costs of performing backups, a typical backup strategy calls for backing up the system at different scopes at different times. That is, you may choose to perform partial backups more frequently and full backups less frequently. The scope of a Controller backup can be categorized into these levels:

Level 1: A light backup of the installation environment only

Level 2: A metadata backup involving all metadata associated with the installation except big data tables.

Level 3: Backs up all data, either by performing a cold backup of the /data directory or a hot backup using a third-party tool.

A possible backup strategy may be to perform a level 1 and level 2 backup very frequently, say nightly, and a level 1 and level 3 backup about once a week. In addition to performing a level 1 or 2 backup, you should also backup the data for the Platform Administration Application with mysqldump on a regular basis. You do not need to backup the Platform Administration Application when you perform a level 3 backup since it also backs up the Platform Administration Application data.