Planning your backups

It is advisable to communicate your backup plans to your Site and User Administrators so that they can plan their backup schedules.
Example. If you plan to schedule monthly backups for a site, intimating the schedule to the Site Administrator can help him plan for daily or weekly backups if necessary.

1. Classify or prioritize data in terms of criticality of operations

Set an operational value on your data assets to help you establish an informed backup strategy for your data.

2. Ensure data consistency

Open or changing files can affect the consistency of data being backed up. It is advisable to refrain from high activity on the site being backed up to ensure data consistency. It is recommended that Site and User Administrators be aware of your backup schedules to ensure data integrity.

3. Choose an appropriate backup destination

An off-site or remote backup is recommended for data that is critical to your operations.

4. Choose an appropriate mode of transfer

You can choose to FTP or Download to back up your files. FTP is more reliable and faster and the recommended option. Large backups to a remote server must be transferred using FTP, while small files may be downloaded to a backup location.

5. Determine an appropriate time to perform back ups

Take backups during a period of low activity. Changes or revisions to data when a backup is in progress may corrupt a backup. Also, changes done when the backup is in progress may not be backed up. As a result, you can lose data revisions that occurred after the last back up.

These situations may be pre-empted by informing Site and User Administrators of your backup schedules so that they refrain from high activity during backup.

6. Schedule backups

Schedule backups to run regularly at an appointed time, typically, when activity on the system is low. Scheduling backups frees up your staff to attend to other tasks and also eliminates the need to remember to back up the site manually. Frequency of changes to a file or data entity is a good indicator of how often a backup must be scheduled.

7. Important: When backups are scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly, note that data revisions made in the interim time-period [since the last backup] will be lost if your system crashes or files get corrupted.

7. Determine the frequency of backups

Ideally, critical files must be backed up daily; files that can be replaced with minimal effort and loss of time can be backed up weekly or monthly.

8. Try dummy restores from the backup

After taking a backup, check the file size and perform a dummy restore to ensure that the backup will restore successfully when needed.