1179 - Backup selection best practices for optimising on-disk storage

Your backup selection refers to the files, databases and other data that are included in your backups. For our video guide to the various backup selection options, click here.

What is on-disk?

Redstor's backup service has measures in place, such as compression, patching, and account-level deduplication, which are intended to ensure that your on-disk storage takes up less space than your total protected data. High-quality data means these measures function optimally, which means fast backups and restores with low on-disk consumption.

Low-quality data, on the other hand, is difficult to patch or deduplicate, which leads to slow backups and restores with high on-disk consumption. This scenario creates additional problems: slow backups make it impossible to backup in small increments if that is desired (e.g. every 15 minutes), while slow restores increase RTO in case of disaster recovery. 

Best practices for backup

We recommend adhering to the following backup selection best practices to maintain high data quality:

• Avoid including corrupted files in the backup selection.
• Avoid backing up already compressed files, or creating new compressed files from the same data sources.
• Avoid backing up data in encrypted format if the data changes daily.
• Wherever possible, use the same file names and locations for each backup.