I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales receipts) and would be using something like timeshift to keep snapshots. I feel like keeping two daily and a weekly would be alright for a store, since the two most recent would not be too old or something. I also feel like using the hourly snapshots would be too taxing on a CPU and might be using to much disk space.

  • computergeek125@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’m probably the overkill case because I have AD+vC and a ton of VMs.

    RPO 24H for main desktop and critical VMs like vCenter, domain controllers, DHCP, DNS, Unifi controller, etc.

    Twice a week for laptops and remote desktop target VMs

    Once a week for everything else.

    Backups are kept: (may be plus or minus a bit)

    • Daily backups for a week
    • Weekly backups for a month
    • Monthly backups for a year
    • Yearly backups for 2-3y

    The software I have (Synology Active Backup) captures data using incremental backups where possible, but if it loses its incremental marker (system restore in windows, change-block tracking in VMware, rsync for file servers), it will generate a full backup and deduplicate (iirc).

    From the many times this has saved me from various bad things happening for various reasons, I want to say the RTO is about 2-6h for a VM to restore and 18 for a desktop to restore from the point at which I decide to go back to a backup.

    Right now my main limitation is my poor quad core Synology is running a little hot on the CPU front, so some of those have farther apart RPOs than I’d like.