Introduction
When we talk about data backup and restore, we need to talk about two essential terms:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO
Knowing how much data loss is tolerable for business impact (RPO) and the maximum amount of time your business can tolerate to be offline (RTO) is important (Picture 1). It defines how you build your backup strategy, how frequently the backup jobs will run and what type of backup is required. This recovery objectives don’t follow a general rule. Each company has other requirements for their business which defines their recovery objectives. If you want to read about RPO and RTO, our blog post “Why do recovery time and recovery point objectives matter?” explains more about RPO and RTO and how to gather the information required to define the values for your environment.
This white paper will show you best practices to help you to achieve and optimize your personal recovery objectives.
No. 1: Back up the Right Data the Right Way
Veeam Backup and Replication can protect several types of source data from different hypervisors, physical machines, unstructured data, cloud environment, SaaS offerings, and different types of applications. Before starting with the implementation, you need to think about the data you need to protect. The first step is to collect the characteristics of the data you want to protect. Do you need to protect applications? What sort of hypervisor is in use? How important is the data on this server for the business? What’s your expected RPO/RTO for each system
As soon as we are familiar with the production data, we can choose the right type of backup job to protect the data. We can choose from different types:
- VM-based backup
- Agent-based backup
- Enterprise application plug-ins
- Unstructured data backup (NAS, Object Storage)
- (Continuous) replication and Continuous Data Protection (CDP
Consult the user guide to get familiar with the different type of jobs and their advantages and disadvantages before you make your decision.