Data protection best practices

All data protection strategies begin with local backups on your appliance. Backups are duplicates of your data, and can run in several modes. Depending on the mode you specify, they capture all data for an asset, or a subset of data that has changed since the last backup. Each backup functions as a recovery point for the protected asset.

After you've backed up your assets, you can recover individual files, databases, file systems, entire machines, or use the instant recovery features to recover critical machines in minutes. We strongly recommend that you also make off-site copies of your local backups in order to recover from a disaster. See Backup copies for details.

Customize your backup strategy to meet the recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) required for your business continuity plan. RPOs and RTOs refer to the maximum amount of data loss and downtime that you can tolerate. For example, if you can tolerate losing a day’s worth of data, your RPO is one day. If you can tolerate only 30 minutes of downtime, your RTO is 30 minutes. RPOs and RTOs can vary per asset, and Unitrends offers different backup and recovery options to ensure that you meet these goals.

To meet your RPOs, use SLA policies or custom schedules to create backups at the desired frequency. To meet your RTOs, use retention policies to control the number of recovery points available on your appliance and instant recovery to quickly spin up critical machines. Use backup copies stored on an off-site target for long-term retention and disaster recovery.

Unitrends supports a number of backup modes to ensure flexible protection policies for various types of data. A single job can use one backup mode, but your appliance can leverage multiple backup modes across various jobs. To be sure you see the full benefits of Unitrends best-in-class deduplication, be sure to run many backups. The more backups, the better the deduplication ratio.

Use the table below to choose the best mode for your environment. Modes are described in more detail in Backups.

Ranking	Backup mode	Benefits
Best	Incremental Forever	• Provides the fastest backup window after the first full backup. • Recommended for VMware, Hyper-V, and most file-level backups. • Reads the full disk once and then processes only changes going forward. • Can create schedules by using SLA policies. (All backup schedules created by SLA policies use the Incremental Forever backup mode.)
Better	Full / Incremental	• Recommended for Exchange backups. • Recommended if you want to control when full backups are taken for the purpose of backup copy management. • Recommended when you want to force a full read of all data periodically. • Inline deduplication ensures that even full backups only write changes to the backup storage.
Good	Full / Differential	• Recommended for SQL backups with additional transaction log protection for RPOs as low as one-minute. • Recommended if you want to simplify recovery of backup copies from tape at the expense of longer backup copy times compared to full / incremental. • Inline deduplication ensures that even full backups only write changes to the backup storage.
Okay	Fulls	• Recommended for Citrix XenServer backups. • Recommended when RPOs are very long (one week or longer). • Can be used with Incremental Forever if you only want full backups to be periodically copied to backup copy storage. • Inline deduplication ensures that even full backups only write changes to the backup storage.