HP B6960-96035 manual Factors influencing your backup strategy, Preparing a backup strategy plan

The time needed for backup depends on the type of backup, full or incremental. For more information, see “Full and incremental backups” on page 91. Data Protector also backs up some popular online database applications. For more information, see the HP Data Protector integration guide.

If you back up to disk, you can take advantage of synthetic backup and disk staging. These advanced backup strategies significantly reduce the time needed for backup. For more information, see Chapter 11 on page 257 and Disk staging on page 118.

When there is a very fast and large disk to be backed up on a slower device, consider the possibility of backing up one hard disk through multiple concurrent Disk Agents. Starting multiple Disk Agents on the same disk speeds up the backup performance considerably.

Also, if there is a large volume of information to be backed up and the available time to complete the backup is limited, consider the possibility of using direct backup to take advantage of SAN speed, reduced network traffic, and the lack of the backup-server bottleneck.

•How often does data need to be backed up?

For each type of data, list how often the data needs to be backed up. For example, user working files may be backed up on a daily basis, system data on a weekly basis, and some database transactions twice a day.

Factors influencing your backup strategy

There are a number of factors that influence how your backup strategy is implemented. Understand these factors before preparing your backup strategy.

•Your company’s backup and storage policies and requirements.

•Your company’s security policies and requirements.

•Your physical network configuration.

•Computer and human resources available at different sites of your company.

Preparing a backup strategy plan

The result of the planning is a backup strategy that must address the following areas:

•How critical system availability (and backup) is to the company

•The need to keep the backed up data at a remote location in case of a disaster.

•The level of business continuance

This includes the recovery and restore plan for all critical client systems.

•The security of backed up data

60 Planning your backup strategy