To ensure recovery of your data you should adopt a systematic removable media rotation schedule. Your rotation schedule should provide you with a varied history of file versions. You should ensure any media that isn’t in active use be taken and stored off-site.
Because your most recent backup file or media may be corrupted, you’ll want to keep older backups at varying intervals. Your ACR server performs a full system backup up nightly and each USB backup disk store up to 7 days worths of backups per disk. (Note: this may vary depending on your backup size, disk size, and system configuration)
As such it is advised that you use one of the regular rotation schedules described below.
- DAILY: Two or more sets of disk are used, one for Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, the other for Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
- WEEKLY: A set of weekly backup disk labeled “Week1,” “Week2,” etc. As with the daily rotaion, each “set” can be either two or more disks. Full backups are recorded daily and the disks are normally swapped on either Saturday, Sunday, or Monday.
For best data retention/recovery the ACR tech team recommend that the backup disks are changed daily to ensure that there is at least one good backup keep offsite in the event of data corruption or disk failure.