Let’s have a look at how you can save more money on storage with cloud backup solutions.If your backup target is an online cloud solution, you need to ask yourself these basic questions:How much data needs to be stored on the cloud? How long will the data need to be stored on cloud? The answers to these have cost implications whether we are considering file server backups, application server backups or VM/Hyper-V backups. Generally, the process involves taking a full backup followed by daily incremental or differentials using retention Policies.
If your entire server is 500-700 GB, a full backup occupy 500-700 GB on cloud storage and daily incremental backup jobs would occupy another 300-400 GB per week. So full and incremental would occupy 1-1.2 TB of data in cloud storage. If you’re going to pay $1/GB for cloud storage, assuming weekly full backups, the entire month is going to cost nearly $4000 a month not including server licensing.
Schedule and Retention Period Modifications:
Hypothetically, let’s say you schedule a weekly full backup on Saturday and undertake daily incrementals from Monday to Friday. You could also schedule incrementals on weekends, if required. Set the Full backup to get overwritten on the next full backup and also each incremental to get overwritten on following weekday with another incremental backup. This backup plan would then help us to have a one full backup and 5 incrementals resulting in optimal data storage.
In the case of DR, the latest full backup and successive incrementals would help us to recover the server completely. If your backup solution has an option to take additional full backups to external USB devices or any other storage apart from cloud storage, you can go ahead with this additional full backup.
This backup plan would save lot of money, as well as retain a complete backup for the sake of DR. As an added caution, perform test restores periodically and make sure that the restore jobs are successful.
