Data Backup: Best Practices

Refer to this chapter's best practices for data backup and consult Planning hardware configurations to estimate your backup storage capacities.

Defining Backup Jobs

To safeguard data like Windows Servers, databases, or virtual machines, establish a backup job definition and schedule it for automatic execution or initiate it manually as needed.

Consider these tips when defining backup jobs:

• Coordinate with your organization’s administrators or stakeholders to align backup jobs with the established Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or Service Level Agreement (SLA).

• Assign a unique volume in Catalogic vStor to each Catalogic DPX Block Backup or Agentless Backup job to maintain consistency and improve manageability.

• For multi-node client backups, Catalogic DPX captures all selected nodes simultaneously, ensuring uniform recovery points.

• Limit backup job definitions to eight client nodes for more manageable and flexible operations within the Catalogic DPX Management Interfaces.

• Include virtual disks like BMR, SQL, and EXCH in the backup source to enable advanced recovery features. Absence of these components in the backup job definition can restrict recovery capabilities.

• Regularly validate your backups for recoverability. Subsequent backups rely on the integrity of the previous ones. Verification can be conducted manually or scheduled.

• If backing up disk data to tape with “Archive to Media,” ensure no scheduling conflicts with block or agentless backups. "Archive to Media" backups may be lengthy as they transfer the entire base image, not just increments, to tape.