Steve Jones - SSC Editor (2/11/2016)

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More fulls can be better, but I like simple over complex. I would think about the issues with administratively managing full/diff/logs and performing restores.

That being said, I might do fulls every hour and just restore them somewhere. That way I have a copy elsewhere if things go south.

One note. be careful about dropping logs too quickly. I might still keep a couple days of logs, even if I have hourly fulls. If this process were to fail and I stopped getting fulls, I'd want to be able to get back up on Monday am if the process had failed on Friday.

Ed Wagner (2/11/2016)

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Something else to think about is growth. Databases grow over time and CRM systems are certainly not known for being small. Take the total size of all your backups for a day and think about how many days worth of backups you want to keep. Multiply those numbers together and that's how much space you're going to need on your backup volume to support your backup plan. Example:

Space per Day = 1TB of full + 100 GB of logs

Total Required = 1.1 TB * 5 days

Total Required = 5.5 TB

Your requirements will increase as the size of your database increases, so keep that in mind when you put together your backup strategy.

Also, make sure you have time allocated to test those backups and verify that they're good. You don't want your first restore to be when you really need it and you figure out the backups are no good. That would be a really bad day.