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Frequency

Backup frequency is a strategic decision driven by how much data loss an organization can tolerate, with different systems often requiring different schedules to balance thoroughness and practicality.

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About this video

Backing up everything as often as possible sounds straightforward, but the volume of data and the time required to complete backups make that approach impractical at scale. Effective backup planning means making deliberate decisions about frequency based on what each system actually requires, rather than applying a single policy across the entire environment. The central factor driving those decisions is recovery point tolerance — specifically, how much data the organization can afford to lose in the event of a failure or incident. A 15-minute tolerance demands backups at least every 15 minutes, while a higher tolerance opens the door to hourly or less frequent schedules. Different systems carry different tolerances, so backup frequency varies accordingly. Databases, which often contain critical and rapidly changing data, may warrant continuous or hourly backups, while servers with more stable content might be backed up on a weekly or monthly cycle. Many environments layer multiple backup types — daily, weekly, and others — to create a schedule that balances data protection with the practical limits of time and storage capacity.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Backup Strategy

Key terms

Recovery Point Objective
RPO
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, defining how far back data must be recoverable.
Disaster Recovery
DR
The process and procedures for recovering IT systems and data following a disruptive event.
Backup Frequency
How often backup jobs are scheduled to run, determined by the criticality of the data, the organization's Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and available storage resources. Higher-frequency backups reduce the amount of data that can be lost in an incident.
Continuous Backup
A backup method that captures data changes in real time or near real time, minimizing potential data loss for critical systems.
Layered Backup Schedule
A backup strategy that combines multiple backup intervals such as hourly, daily, and weekly to balance data protection with operational and storage constraints.

Topics

Backup Frequency Recovery Point Objective Backup Scheduling Data Protection Backup Strategy Disaster Recovery

Transcript

In the past, I've just had the idea, well, let's just back up everything and let's do it often. But it just becomes unrealistic. There is so much data, and so much time it takes to back everything up. So then we have to start thinking, okay, how do we be strategic with that? And one of the things that we have to be strategic with is how frequent are we going to do our backups?

Of course, a lot of this has to do with how much information are we willing to lose. If it's 15 minutes, then we have to do a backup at least every 15 minutes. But if we go further out, then our frequency can be further out as well, so maybe we are doing it every hour instead.

So perhaps we're backing up our servers on a weekly or monthly basis. And maybe our databases, we have an hourly, or maybe even a continuous, backup going. There are some systems that allow us to even do some sort of continuous backup. Or perhaps we're doing a daily backup. Or, as we'll learn, there's different types of backups. So if we're backing up a database, we actually might do a combination of hourly and daily and weekly backup of that database.

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