Defining a backup strategy

Defining a backup strategy before you create your backup jobs ensures that you have the backups that you require to successfully restore or clone your resources. Your service-level agreement (SLA), recovery time objective (RTO), and recovery point objective (RPO) largely determine your backup strategy.

About this task

An SLA defines the level of service that is expected and addresses many service-related issues, including the availability and performance of the service. RTO is the time by which a business process must be restored after a disruption in service. RPO defines the strategy for the age of the files that must be recovered from backup storage for regular operations to resume after a failure. SLA, RTO, and RPO contribute to the data protection strategy.

Procedure

Determine when you should back up your resources.
Decide how many backup jobs you require.
Decide how to name your backups.
Decide if you want Consistency Group Snapshot copies and decide on appropriate options for deleting Consistency Group Snapshot copies.
Decide whether you want to use NetApp SnapMirror technology for replication or NetApp SnapVault technology for long term retention.
Determine the retention period for the Snapshot copies on the source storage system and the SnapMirror destination.
Determine if you want to run any commands before or after the backup operation and provide a prescript or postscript.