Planning a Backup Schedule

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

The backup schedule is perhaps the most important consideration when planning for disaster recovery. It is critical to plan your backups around your restore requirements. For example, you run only incremental backups of a file server over an extended period of time. This approach delivers very fast backups that use little network bandwidth. However, to restore the server, you would need to restore all of the incremental backups, which could take days to complete. A backup plan presumes a restore plan: Your backup plan should always be based on your requirements for restoring data. You should carefully test and document all of the processes and time required to fully recover your servers from backup data. Use the results of this testing to establish the requirements for your backup schedules.