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/delete, 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.

This is also applicable to CLI systems

Setup of Both Periodic and Continuous Backup Schedule

On a Windows platform, although it is possible to setup both Periodic backup schedule and Continuous backup schedule on a File backup set, it is recommended to only use one schedule as only one scheduled backup job can run at any one time.

For example, a backup job is started by the Periodic backup schedule and is running, if a Continuous backup is scheduled to run, the backup job will be skipped and vice versa.

Periodic Backup Schedule vs Continuous Backup Schedule

The following table shows the comparison between a periodic and continuous backup schedule:

Feature Periodic Backup Schedule Continuous Backup Schedule
Will run whether or not a change on the backup source is made ✅ ❌
Run Retention Policy after backup ✅ ❌
Exclude system files from the backup ❌ ✅
Only apply to files smaller than (MB) size ❌ ✅
Exclude Filter ❌ ✅
Supported on all operating systems (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, QNAP and Synology) ✅ Only supported on Windows OS
Supports all backup set types ✅ Only supports File backup sets

Temporary Directory Folder Location

Temporary directory folder is used by AhsayOBM for storing 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 disk space.

This is also applicable to CLI systems

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 is recommended.

This is also applicable to CLI systems