How often should I backup my data?

Otava continues its business continuity series of videos on data backup and replication by offering advice on how frequently your production should be backed up.

Steven: How often you should backup your data is a great question. Really what it depends on is the sensitivity of your data and how frequently your data changes. Let’s say that you are a mortgage company and you process mortgages at the end of the day and you have all of this paperwork that is placed on your file server. You may very well just back up once a day.

Let’s say that you are a highly transactional e-commerce business and that data is changing very, very frequently and you’re choosing to do SQL dumps and transaction log dumps several times a day. Maybe you will want to backup four times a day because your data changes so frequently.

The rules around how frequently you should backup will really be dependent on how sensitive your data is, how frequently it changes, and the volume of that changed data.