How many backup tapes, disk, drives, CD/DVDs should I use, and whats the best rotation strategy?
The best backup plan and rotation strategy depends on how much money you invest in backup media. The more tapes, external hdds, CD/DVDs, etc you have to rotate and backup to, the better protected you are against data loss. It is also best to perform Full backups daily of your data, rather than Incremental or Differential backups. Running Full backups ensures that you have a complete set of data on each backup tape, disk, drive, DVD, etc. This means that when it comes time to restore, even if some of your tapes or disks are lost or unreadable, you can still retrieve all of your data from the most recent working backup. If, on the other hand, you performed Incremental backups from Tuesday to Friday, you would need all 5 backup tapes or disks from the week to restore all of your data; and if the Full backup from the Monday was corrupt or unreadable you would only be able to restore files that had changed since Monday, and consequently not be able to retrieve much of your data. All good ro
