backup timetable scheduling differences

[mark_five]

How would a small business backup timetable schedule differ to a large business backup timetable schedule?

[Vernon Frazee]

Frequency of backups.

[mfutty]

The backup schedule should be determined by the frequency of data change on the server, the importance of the data, and how far back in time the company is willing to go (how much data they are willing to potentially lose) should a restore be required.

The size of the company should not be a factor - a small company that creates or modifies a lot of data every day such as recievables could easily require the same backup schedule as a large company; the only difference would be the number of servers that they would be backing up.

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Experience: Something you don't get until 10 minutes after you needed it.

[Silicon Scream]

Adding to what mfutty said, another variable here is your network bandwith, or hardware setup of your backup gear to the amount of data that will need to be backed up. Presently we're running a 100Mb network and my Exchange server has so many mailboxes to backup that it takes close to 26hours to perform one full backup of all mailboxes at the brick level. This can cut into time of other jobs without proper planning i.e. redundant servers, backup jobs etc... Planning is everything when a restore determines whether or not you'll be with the company tomorrow.

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Systems Administrator
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