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Groom Backup Jobs to Save on Backup Costs
The basic goal is to minimize the cost of backup without additional risk and at a minimum of administrative effort (your effort).
The cost of your backup is closely related to the amount of data being backed up. With online backup, the cost is usually directly related to the storage space used. With our online backup system, the account sizes and pricing on based on compressed storage.
Backup Storage Space Used
There are two basic components to your backup storage:
- Data Area - Current files being backed up
- Retention Area - Deleted files and older versions of files
In most common small business scenarios, the retention area is a very small percentage of the total storage space used. This means that retention adjustments to backup jobs rarely results in the desired outcome of cheaper backups.
Retention Options
Files deleted from your file server are not immediately deleted from the stored backups. They are retained for a period of time based on the retention settings.
We generally recommend at least a 90 day retention period, but many prefer longer.
Changing the retention settings, even drastically, will probably not save much space. However, there are sometimes good reasons to adjust retention settings:
