What is the best practice for backing up and protecting my data?

What follows are our basic suggestions for best practices surrounding data back up and recovery with Steelgate software.

Offsite

• Use offsite backup with critical data to help avoid a single point of failure.
• Select only critical information to back up offline to minimize the amount of data being transferred, and increase overall performance.
• (xSP) To enable FastBIT transfers for a file, that file must have at least 2 copies previously backed up on the server.
• (xSP) To enhance FastBIT, make sure the Work directory has free disk space totaling at least 3x the total amount of data you want to transfer.

Local

• Create a rotation schedule as opposed to running each backup manually to increase the stability and performance of your backups.
• Schedule weekly Full Backups and daily Incremental Backups to maximize your rotation’s efficiency.
• Use more than one device for your backups, ideally alternating between devices regularly to avoid a single point of failure.
• Schedule jobs to run after office hours to ensure that all information is current and that the software will not interfere with normal procedures while it runs.

Restores

• Stop any non-essential services when running a restore to increases overall stability during the restore.
• Ensure that the hardware configuration has not changed, or is as similar as possible to the configuration when the data was backed up.
• The “Restore File to Alternate Location” setting allows you to restore files without overwriting existing information.

Logging

• Logging Options can be found under Settings > Notification.
• Set logging to Summary (default) unless you are troubleshooting an issue with backing up/restoring.
• Email logs to monitor your backup jobs remotely.