Best Practices and Recommendations

Periodic Backup Schedule

The periodic backup schedule should be reviewed regularly to ensure the interval is sufficient to handle the data volume on the machine. Over time, data usage pattern may change on a production server, i.e., the number of new files created, the number of files which are updated/deleted, new users may be added etc.

When using periodic backup schedules with small backup intervals such as backup every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes etc. although the increased backup frequently does ensure that changes to files are captured regularly which allows greater flexibility in recovery to a point in time.

Consider the following key points to efficiently handle backup sets with periodic backup schedule.

  • Hardware - to achieve optimal performance, compatible hardware requirements is a must. Ensure you have the backup machine’s appropriate hardware specifications to accommodate frequency of backups,
    • so that the data is always backed up within the periodic backup interval.
    • so that the backup frequency does not affect the performance of the production server.
  • Storage - ensure you have enough storage quota allocated based on the amount of new data and changed data you will backup.
  • Retention Policy - also make sure to consider the Retention Policy settings and Retention Area storage management which can grow because of the changes in the backup data for each backup job.

Temporary Directory Folder Location

Temporary directory folder is used by AhsayOBM for storing backup set index files generated during a backup job and temporary restore files.

To ensure optimal backup/restoration performance, it is recommended that the temporary directory folder is set to a local drive with sufficient free space. If the machine has more than one partition, it should be located in another partition other than the system.

Backup Destination

It is advisable to create backup sets with multiple backup destinations to ensure availability of data during restoration. Even if one backup destination fails, you still have other backup destinations to restore your data from.

Downside of this is it will use up more storage quota and longer backup time. If these two factors are not an issue, then adding multiple backup destinations in AhsayCBS, local machine and cloud storage is recommended.