How long do you keep MIS database backups for? And how granular are they?

[pete]

Here, I retain the daily backups for the current and previous month, any backups done on patch days for the current year and one backup per month for the last 12 months.

 

We had an auditor (years ago) who wanted to see a snapshot of our data at a specific date, hence the habit of possible backup overkill.

[Hecate]

We don't retain data for more than a month. For recovery purposes we have daily backups and the thought of trying to reconstruct from a backup more than a few days old gives me nightmares (we keep 3 copies of daily backups in different places). SIMS retains historic data so we have that and older backups wouldn't run on the current SIMS version so I can't see any pnt in hanging on to old backups.

[kmount]

Backups?! What are these?

 

Er, we work on 6 months for weeklys and 2 weeks for daily's as well as Term tapes.

[EduTech]

We have daily back-ups, and we just store them for about a month, and the delete them to make room for the next months worth

[DMcCoy]

4 daily, 4 weekly and monthly tapes going back to mid 2006

[Stuart_C]

My sims backups are full daily backups on a two week cycle. This backup includes the file backups of SIMS created by the upgrade process and manually by me when I patch the DB.

 

These only go back to easter as that's when I put the new server in. I have all of them on the old server that I will archive when I decommissionthe old machine.

[User3204]

The trouble with SIMS data is that it rapidly goes out of date.

 

I have 10 tapes, so this gives me 10 days (or two weeks), but I also have a scheduled backup to the NAS, so I end up wth duplicates (at another time of the day) on this, usually they're manually deleted once a month.

 

 

 

I _want_ to get SIMS onto a VM machine, as according to VM Ware, it can do an hourly (for example) system backup.

[pete]

Ok, so I am being over-cautious. Cheers guys.

 

Having had an auditor ask to see a snapshot of the old (nt4, manky, crusty sims) sims server, I've always erred on the side of excessive backups.