Best practices for managing backed up data

To effectively manage your backed up data on remote systems, consider the following best practice suggestions:

• For system level backups:
  • When you run your initial baseline backup, record the duration of the backup operation, or look up the history of the backup and note the time to complete the baseline backup.
  • As you run subsequent delta backups, note the time duration for these operations as well, which should be significantly less than the baseline backup.
  • Continue to run regularly scheduled delta backups as needed.
  • When the duration of the delta backups begin to approach the duration of the initial baseline backup, you should consider archiving and pruning your backup data, and performing a new baseline backup so that subsequent delta backups reflect only the changes from that point forward.
• For component level backups:
  • Run backups on a regular schedule or on demand as needed. Component level data is backed up only if there are changes since the previous backup.
  • The volume group backup operation fails if you select more than one volume group with active volumes to backup. The work around is to select only one volume group with active volumes per component backup. If multiple volume groups with active volumes are present, then create different component backup profiles and schedule them to run at different times.

Over time, your remote backup system storage will begin to fill up with multiple backups. To ensure that you have adequate space for continuous backup operations, you should perform some general archiving and pruning tasks to delete data that is no longer needed and to free up additional storage:

• Before you perform any purge operations, or before changing backup locations, be sure to archive your critical backup data to a tape or other backup solution (SAN, etc.).
• Ensure that encryption keys for archived backups are stored safely and are not lost.
• After your critical data is archived, you can purge data from the current backup directory on the external server, or you can change the backup directory location to a new location as needed.