Best Practices and Recommendations

The following are some best practices and recommendations we strongly recommend you follow for optimized backup and restore performance:

Backup Destination

To provide maximum data protection and flexible restore options for agent-based backup, it is recommended to configure:

  • At least one offsite or cloud destination

  • At least one local destination for fast recovery

Temporary Directory Folder Location

Temporary directory folder is used by the AhsayOBM for storing backup set index files and any incremental or differential backup files generated during a backup job. To ensure optimal backup/restoration performance, it is recommended that the temporary directory folder is set to a local drive.

Performance Recommendations

Schedule backup jobs when system activity is low to achieve the best possible performance.

Bucket Management for Enterprise Cloud Storage Providers

If you have chosen to back up files from an enterprise cloud storage (e.g., Amazon S3, Wasabi, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, etc.), you will have to select a bucket name during the creation of cloud file backup set. Each bucket has a single compartment, and an access key is associated with a single bucket. Therefore, each backup set can back up one bucket.

For account with multiple buckets, the backup should be organized into one bucket per backup set. For best practice, make sure to assign one bucket name per backup set so you can ensure that you are selecting the correct file(s) to back up.

Test Restore Operations

Perform test restores periodically to ensure your backup is setup and backed up properly. Performing recovery test can also help identify potential issues or gaps in your recovery plan. It is important that you do not try to make the test easier, as the objective of a successful test is not to demonstrate that everything is flawless, but to discover faults in your recovery plan. There might be flaws identified in the plan throughout the test and it is important to identify those flaws.

Periodic Backup Schedule

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

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 accomodate 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

  • 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.